altogether different from what Charleston's historic interiors require. Charlevoix, where Lake Michigan and Lake Charlevoix shape a town built around water and light, asks its finest woods to hold their own against windows that frame nothing but sky—and Black Limba's golden brown heartwood, crossed with those grey-to-black veins that define the figured grade, becomes a surface that answers luminosity with its own interior warmth. The darker streaking that distinguishes Black Limba from its plainer White Limba counterpart reads here not as contrast but as conversation, each vein catching the cool northern light and returning it transformed, aged deeper by the very atmosphere that surrounds these lakefront builds. It is precisely this capacity to darken and deepen with time, to let color mature rather than fade, that makes figured Limba so suited to the kind of architecture now taking hold along the corridors leading south toward Charlotte, where the scale of demand shifts and the