Custom guitars with unique inlay themes are hardly news these days, but this Santa Cruz Guitar Company 12-fret 000 takes the concept a step further than most. With materials and friendships that span four continents, this guitar is a prime example of modern-day world trade.

It all began when Jay Bonner, a specialist in Islamic ornamentation, wanted to design a guitar for his boss and friend in Stuttgart, Germany, Dr. Bodo Rasch. Several years ago Rasch hired Bonner to help design 27 domes in an expansion of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad. The domes, where thousands of pilgrims gather to pray during the hajj, feature ornate carvings in rare old-growth cedar (provided by the King of Morocco) from the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. Bonner knew there was a small amount of this rare cedar leftover after the project was completed, and since the wood is often used for the soundboards of ouds, he thought it would make it an excellent choice for a guitar top. Rasch owns several classical guitars but few steel-strings, so Bonner planned a presentation instrument to fill the gap in his friend’s collection.

Decades ago, while growing up in Palo Alto, California, and playing old-time music, Bonner often hung out at my shop, Gryphon Stringed Instruments, so he now asked us to help in choosing woods for the guitar’s back and sides and to recommend someone to actually build the guitar. Soon after, he traveled to the Santa Cruz Guitar Company with some of Gryphon’s highly figured South American mahogany under one arm and bundles of Atlas cedar under the other. Santa Cruz’s Richard Hoover agreed to do the project, and the cedar was resawn into a suitable guitar top. Meanwhile, in New York, Dave Nichols’ Custom Pearl Inlay was carefully transforming Bonner’s drawings for the fretboard and headstock into an intricate web of repeating scrolls and curls echoing the carvings adorning the pillars and domes in Medina. Once the inlaid fretboard and headstock veneer were delivered to Santa Cruz, the Islamic-themed 000 began to take shape. Several months later, Bonner was finally able to see and play the instrument he had first envisioned almost two years earlier, and soon after Dr. Rasch had his first American steel-string guitar—with inlays that remind him of one of the most important architectural projects in his career.