Crimson & Olive & Beige

Crimson (vivid dark warm), Olive (dark muted earthy warm), and Beige (pale warm neutral) form an all-warm analogous palette of extraordinary tonal range — from the most vivid dark warm (Crimson) through the most muted dark warm (Olive) to the most luminous pale warm (Beige). Beige provides a naturally luminous ground that elevates Olive and Crimson above it, creating the most naturally warm and most naturally Mediterranean earthy palette.

The palette is the visual world of the North African Berber (Amazigh) craft tradition — specifically the most celebrated center of Moroccan Berber textiles and handicrafts: Marrakech's medina and the surrounding High Atlas Mountains. The Marrakech palette: the deep vivid crimson of the Moroccan rose water (l'argan — the rose-water and pomegranate stall in the souks of the Marrakech medina, with the characteristic deep vivid crimson-to-rose of the Damask rose petals — Rosa × damascena — dried or in rosewater bottles — the most important Moroccan botanical product after argan oil); the dark muted olive of the ancient olive trees and argan trees of the High Atlas foothills (the Arganeraie biosphere reserve — the most important argan forest in the world, designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve 1998 — where the ancient gnarled argan trees form the most characteristic landscape feature of the southwestern Moroccan plateau between the Atlantic coast and the High Atlas); and the warm pale beige of the Moroccan sandstone (rose marble — the local pierre de Marrakech — warm beige-to-rose sandstone from which virtually the entire medina of Marrakech is constructed — the characteristic 'rose-red city' color that gives Marrakech its Arabic name: Marrakesh — the 'Land of God' or 'the red city').