The Collection
The four
One cloth, dyed four ways. Each name comes from a place or an hour, and each carries the language of it.
Midnight
Midnight Élixir
Dark blue, close to black. The colour of a room after the light has gone.
Élixir is French, and keeps its accent. In French the hour is minuit, the middle of the night rather than the end of the evening.
The darkest of the four, and the one that stops registering soonest once it is on.
La nuit porte conseil.
French proverb, in use since 1626. The night brings counsel.
Last light
Blush del Sol
A warm, low pink. The light that reaches the eye through a closed lid while the sun is still up.
Sol is Spanish for sun. In Spain the brightest hours are the ones spent indoors.
The lightest of the four, and the only one made for a room that is not yet dark.
La penumbra.
Spanish. The half-light kept indoors while the sun is at its highest.
Agarwood
Arabian Oud Mocha
A dark brown, drawn from oud. Agarwood produces its resin only after the tree is injured, and the process takes decades.
Oud is the Arabic word for wood. Mocha is al-Mukhā, the Yemeni port that shipped the world's coffee for a century and a half.
The heaviest of the four. On a bedside table it looks more like an object than like cloth.
Bakhoor.
Arabic. Agarwood warmed in a mabkhara and carried through the house at the close of the day.
The tea room
Kyoto Sage
A muted green, taken from the tea room. Tatami, matcha, cedar.
Kyoto held the tea ceremony for four hundred years. In Kyoto the evening is what the day is arranged around.
The most even of the four, and the coolest.
Nijiriguchi.
Japanese. The tea room door, sixty centimetres square, which no guest passes without lowering themselves.
Choosing
The four differ only in colour. If that makes the decision harder, take the one that matches the room where it will be kept.
All four are cut from the same cloth: Grade 6A mulberry silk, 22 momme, contoured, hand embroidered. €55 each.
Two of them arrive without shipping costs — complimentary delivery starts at €99.