Kōwhaiwhai are the painted koru and fern-frond scrolls that flow along the heke (rafters) inside a Māori wharenui meeting house. Curling, bilaterally balanced and rendered in three earth pigments — kōkōwai red ochre, soot black, and a pale clay grey-white — they turn structural timber into narrative ornament against a deep soot-black ground.

This design system distills that painted-rafter tradition into a digital language: a soot-black page, kōkōwai-red and white koru scrolls, and inscriptional serif type. Red carries blood and life, black the earth and the void of creation, white purity and light.