The Kujaku — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Paired Peacocks and Peonies in Champagne Gold

Count the eyes in one tail and you will lose the thread. Hundreds of them, each a small cream crescent, each woven on its own.

A Japanese ceremonial silk bed runner set, runner and cushions cut from one obi at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam.

Kujaku — the peacock — appears in pairs on this cloth, facing one another inside large ogival roundels among peonies, with smaller floral roundels set between. The ground is champagne gold, filled edge to edge with a fine metallic pattern; the birds are matte silk in coral, teal, lilac and slate, and the eyes of the tails are picked out in silver. The roundel fill is a denser weave than the ground around it, so each pair of birds sits inside a frame that reads as a second, closer texture.

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, with three cushions for the head: one with the peacocks, two in plain champagne silk.

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.