context, another set of demands on the veneer's surface. Richmond's light is tidewater light—softer, more humid, carrying the diffused warmth of a river city where afternoon sun filters through atmospheric moisture and enters lobbies, courtrooms, and residential libraries at lower angles than the high-desert clarity of Reno ever permitted. Here, that dense undulating mottle does not flash and retreat as it did under Nevada's unforgiving brightness; instead, the tightly stacked horizontal ripples and vertical ribbon striping settle into a sustained, rolling luminosity, the amber and honey-brown tones deepening toward a richness that rewards prolonged viewing rather than demanding quick attention. Richmond designers have long understood this quality—that Black Mottled Makore in humid Mid-Atlantic light becomes less a spectacle and more a presence, its three-dimensional shimmer working quietly across a wall or panel face the way good architecture works on a city block, gaining authority over time. As this same sheet moves north toward Ridgewood, it will carry that earned warmth into yet another register of residential expectation, where the figure must prove itself not across a