new audiences in the workshops and fabrication houses that line Roanoke's industrial corridors. Where River Hills prizes Black Limba for the quiet theater of residential interiors, Roanoke's craftspeople reach for those same grey-to-black streaks and veins as functional vocabulary—architectural millwork, contract furniture, commercial installations where the golden brown heartwood must hold its drama under harsher light and heavier use. The wood's tendency to darken with age becomes, in Roanoke's hands, not a liability but a design tool, calibrated into specifications so that what a client sees at installation is only the opening movement of a longer visual story. And as those specifications travel north toward Rochester, the question sharpens: how does a veneer this expressive perform when the scale of production