structured and historically referential. In Oak Park, where Prairie School geometry and Arts and Crafts restraint define the architectural vocabulary, Black Limba's golden brown heartwood offers a warmth that honors tradition while its grey-to-black streaks introduce a restless, almost calligraphic energy across the surface—an organic counterpoint to the rigid horizontals and clean sight lines these interiors demand. Where NuLu embraces narrative layering, Oak Park insists on disciplined composition, and yet the veneer thrives in both contexts precisely because its figuring is never decorative excess but structural character, darkening with age in a way that lets a room deepen alongside the life lived within it. It is this capacity for dignified transformation that makes Black Limba not merely compatible with Oak Park's design heritage but genuinely conversant with it, and it is the same capacity that positions the wood to meet the demands now emerging farther west in Oakland, where restraint gives way to