The events I'm about to describe took place in the winter of 2024, though they represent a story that began many years earlier, in the realm of mechanical keyboards and their peculiar enthusiasts.
Perhaps it would interest you to know that this particular keyset—the SA Grand Budapest—emerged not unlike a perfectly preserved pastry from Mendl's, its colors as precise as they were the day they were first conceived. The initial offering appeared with calculated certainty, but it was Round 2 that materialized like the majestic elk in the mountain mist—unexpected, yet somehow precisely on schedule. The pink, you see, isn't simply pink, but rather the exact shade one might find on the hotel's facade at precisely 4:15 in the afternoon, when the sun hits it at a 42-degree angle.
Through a rather remarkable series of events involving seventeen community members, three separate time zones, and one particularly adamant collector of vintage keyboard ephemera, the kitting was entirely reconstructed. What was once a singular collection has been refined into an elegant base set, complemented by a series of specialized additions—accommodating everything from those peculiar 40% keyboards to the most elaborate of ergonomic layouts. Each kit maintains the sort of authenticity that suggests it was discovered in a forgotten filing cabinet in the hotel's former accounting office.
The accompanying artifacts—two metal specimens produced by the artisans at Signature Plastics and three deskmats of exceptional merit—were executed with the kind of precision that would have made M. Gustave himself pause mid-morning-routine to admire their craftsmanship.
(At this point, I should mention that all of this was orchestrated by a designer known simply as Madeo, though this fact is whispered in keyboard circles with the same reverence as one might discuss the author of a particularly remarkable secret recipe.)
