recede into light. In Montecito, where architecture earns its elegance through what it withholds, Black Limba's grey-to-black veining does not announce itself against the golden brown heartwood so much as it settles there, a quiet authority beneath whitewashed plaster and Pacific-filtered sun. The wood darkens with age here as it darkens everywhere—Rosebud ships the same Louisville-graded flitch to Montecito as to any coast—but the coastal light slows your perception of that deepening, so that a panel installed this year will seem unchanged until some afternoon years from now when you notice it has gathered gravity. It is this patience in the material that carries it inland, toward Morehead, where the relationship between wood and light
