The Shippō — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Seven Treasures with Raised Flowers in Ivory

Close your eyes and run a hand over it: you would find the flowers before the circles.

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

Shippō — the seven treasures — is the lattice of interlocking circles, each ring passing through its neighbours so that no circle stands alone. Here the circles are drawn in flat gold on ivory, and at every crossing sits a flower head worked in thick matte floss, vermilion, yellow, apple green, lilac and pink, raised a few millimetres above the gold. It is the most three-dimensional surface in the Renaras bed collection; in side light the flowers throw their own small shadows.

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, 201 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 140 or 160 cm mattress, with four cushions for the head: two carrying the lattice, two in plain cream 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.