From Cedar Rapids to Cedarburg, the veneer carries that same interplay of golden brown heartwood streaked with grey-to-black veining, but here along the Milwaukee corridor the craft community reads those darker figures differently—cabinetmakers and millworkers in this historic district prize the contrast between pale sapwood and dramatic dark striations as a design language all its own. Cedarburg's restored limestone workshops know what age does to Black Limba, how that light yellowish tone deepens over seasons into something richer, and they build with that trajectory in mind, selecting flitches from Rosebud's Louisville inventory that will mature alongside the architecture they serve. The wood's indistinct heartwood-to-sapwood boundary becomes an asset here, allowing panels to blend seamlessly across wide expanses where harder demarcation lines would interrupt the eye, and it is precisely this subtlety that begins to matter even more as the veneer moves further into the desert Southwest, where light behaves in ways that Chandler's
