The Saiun — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Coloured Clouds in Teal, Sage, Oxblood and Lilac on Gold

Four colours of cloud, and they refuse to take turns.

Saiun — clouds coloured by the light behind them — cross this cloth as long drifting bands: teal, sage green, oxblood and lilac, each body of matte silk carrying gold scroll-work and small blossoms inside it. The ground beneath is gold, speckled edge to edge with a tiny floral fill, so the cloth holds two levels of pattern at once. The bands never repeat in the same order; the rhythm is irregular by design, and the eye keeps travelling to check.

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 the longest and widest runner in the Renaras bed collection, 290 cm across a 200 cm bed with a fall of nearly half a metre at each side, and four cushions for the head: two carrying the clouds, two in plain gold silk.

Each cushion closes with an envelope pocket, the runner is backed in plain cream 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.