—a promise that the cabinet-maker in Mountain Brook understands instinctively, watching those grey-to-black veins settle deeper into the golden brown heartwood over seasons of Alabama humidity, the whole panel acquiring a gravity it did not possess on the day it was installed. Here the clientele prizes restraint with an undertone of drama, and Black Limba delivers precisely that: sapwood pale enough to read as neutral, heartwood figured enough to arrest the eye, the boundary between them so soft and undemarked that a well-bookmatched panel seems to breathe rather than divide. Rosebud ships these sheets from Louisville already knowing what Mountain Brook will make of them—knowing, too, that the same sheets will find a cooler reception and an entirely different life when they arrive a few states north, climbing toward the sharper light and steeper expectations of Mt. Washington.