The Bekkō — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Tortoiseshell Lattice in Champagne Gold

An obi is knotted at the back, where the wearer never sees it. This one now lies where you will see it every morning.

The pattern is kikkō — the tortoiseshell lattice — six sides inside six sides, borrowed from the animal the Japanese proverb credits with ten thousand years. On this fukuro obi the hexagons nest ring within ring in pale silver-grey and ivory, set into a champagne satin ground whose sheen comes from the weave itself rather than from metal. Two hairlines, one coral and one mauve, edge every hexagon and change places as they travel the length, the only irregularity in an otherwise exact repeat. In side light the ground gleams and the lattice holds still. The coral and mauve you find only when you sit down.

Renaras designs and reimagines existing Japanese ceremonial silk into contemporary pieces for daily life — this is the Renaras mottainai: the bringing of new imagination into a living tradition. Woven once for ceremony, the obi was cut at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam into a runner for the foot of the bed, 239 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 180 or 200 cm mattress, and three cushions for the head: one carrying the lattice, two in plain champagne silk, so that the third has something quiet to speak against.

Each cushion closes with an envelope pocket, the runner is backed in plain silk, and no metal touches the silk anywhere.

The set arrives with the Renaras Passport, a small handmade record of the silk's first life and its transformation, signed and dated in Amsterdam.

One silk. One story. One piece. Never repeated.