Damson · AW 2026
For most of history, this colour cost too much.
The deep end of purple was once rationed by law and priced by the gram. Then a plum from Damascus turned up in every English hedgerow. Damson is that colour, minus the rules — cut for five Bang & Olufsen speakers, on in about a minute and off just as easily.
The colour as law. Justinian in imperial purple, San Vitale, Ravenna, before 547
I · The colour
Purple was expensive long before it was fashionable.
Tyrian purple came from sea snails — roughly twelve thousand of them for a gram and a half of dye — which is why Rome, and later Byzantium, wrote laws about who was allowed to wear it. In 1856 a teenage chemist made the colour by accident from coal tar, and the price collapsed. What survived was the deep end: not the lilac that could suddenly be made by the tonne, but the plum. Damson takes its name from one.
A solid colour has nothing to hide behind. Every centimetre of the fabric is the design.
Shropshire Damson. Chromolithograph by Alois Lunzer, nursery catalogue, 1909
Archive images: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Beoplay A9 — 70 cm across, in the deepest register of the room
II · The surface
A solid colour asks more of the fabric than a pattern does.
With a print the eye reads the motif and forgives the material. With one colour there is no motif — what you look at is the weave itself. Acoustically transparent fabric is open and matte by necessity, which suits a deep colour: no sheen to catch the window, so the purple reads as depth rather than shine. Against pale walls it reads as a shape; against oak or olive it reads as colour, and the room gets warmer rather than darker.
Beosound Shape — plum, olive and off-white, tiled until they become a wall
Beosound Theatre — 122 cm, the widest surface in most living rooms, now the quietest
III · The fit
Fitted, not glued.
Summer Beat was the loud half of the year — pink against green, windows open. Damson is the other half: the light drops, the textiles go to wool, the colour goes deeper.
Each cover is cut to the geometry of its speaker and fitted over the original front — no tools, no adhesive, nothing left behind when you change your mind. The same acoustically transparent weave across all five models, so the sound passes through as if the cover were not there.
Designed in Munich. Free worldwide shipping.
Damson, in fifteen seconds.
One colour, seventy centimetres across, with nothing for the eye to hide behind.
The edition · five speakers
Every design for each model: Beoplay A9 covers · Beosound Level covers · Beosound Shape covers · Beosound Stage covers · Beosound Theatre covers
Bring your own, with Tegrino Designer.
Every cover here started as a file. Yours can too — upload an image, or a single colour, and we cut it to the same geometry, for any Bang & Olufsen speaker we make for.
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