the salt-heavy air of the Atlantic? In Montauk, where every surface answers to ocean wind and the bleaching persistence of coastal light, Black Limba's tendency to darken with age becomes not a liability but a collaboration—the grey-to-black streaks deepening season by season as if the wood were slowly learning the vocabulary of storm clouds over Ditch Plains. Where Mockingbird Valley interiors moved through sheltered warmth, here the veneer meets architects building against exposure, and the golden brown heartwood holds its ground precisely because it was never meant to stay pale. The sapwood's soft greyish-yellow boundary, not clearly demarcated from the heart, gives panels an atmospheric blur that echoes fog rolling off the point—and as the eye follows that blur toward the structured neighborhoods of Montclair, it begins to ask whether darkness in wood is weather or
