Des Moines answers that question not with theory but with practice—in a city where summer humidity swings seventy points from winter's bone-dry furnace heat, Black Limba's light yellowish-to-golden-brown heartwood proves remarkably stable, its interlocked grain resisting the seasonal push and pull that warps lesser species into expensive mistakes. Where Denver's altitude stripped moisture from the air year-round, Iowa's craftsmen face the opposite challenge of extremes in both directions, and they have learned that Limba's gentle density accepts and releases atmospheric change without telegraphing stress through the veneer face. The grey-to-nearly-black veining that earns the species its name darkens subtly with age here, so a Des Moines installation that begins as a dramatic contrast of gold and charcoal slowly deepens into something richer, something that belongs to time as much as to the room. It is exactly this quality of deepening—of a surface that refuses to stay static—that makes Black Limba such an unexpected fit as we follow it east now, into the dense architectural appetite of Detroit.