The Kikkō — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Flowered Tortoiseshell Lattice in Olive Gold and Scarlet

Scarlet does not usually sit still. Here every cell of it is held in a frame of gold, exactly where the loom put it.

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

Kikkō — the tortoiseshell lattice — is drawn on this cloth in heavy flat gold over an olive-gold satin, and every hexagon is filled: a solid panel of scarlet, and inside it a flower head in cream and gold. The red is a woven weft rather than a colour laid on top, so it sits a hair lower than the gold and the hexagons carry real relief. In side light the gold lifts and the red goes deeper. At night it is the red you see first.

Renaras designs and reimagines existing Japanese ceremonial silk into contemporary pieces for daily life — this is our mottainai: the bringing of new imagination into a living tradition. Woven once for ceremony, the obi was cut at our Amsterdam atelier into a runner for the foot of the bed, 241 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 180 or 200 cm mattress, with three cushions for the head: one in the flowered lattice, two in plain champagne silk to give the scarlet somewhere to rest.

Each cushion closes with an envelope pocket, the runner is backed in plain khaki-gold 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.