Riva Arte — 3½-inch European white oak for herringbone and chevron

Arte is the board for a patterned floor. At three and a half inches wide and just over twenty-one inches long, it is proportioned for herringbone and chevron — the floors that are laid as a design rather than as rows — and it is the one Riva format whose length is fixed, because a pattern needs every piece the same.

It comes in Prime grade only, which matters more here than anywhere else in the line: a pattern is read as a whole, and knots or strong colour variation in a single piece pull the eye out of it. Four colours — Pearl, Crystal, Earth and Smoke — chosen so that the light and the mid tones both have a pattern option.

A patterned floor is a different installation from a plank floor. The layout is set out from the centre of the room, the borders are cut to it, and the substrate has to be flat to a tighter standard because the pieces are short. It is our crews that do it, which is why we quote it as its own job rather than by the square foot of a plank floor.

Where it goes: an entry, a dining room, a study, a primary suite — the room that is meant to be looked at, or the one room in a house of plank floors that changes the rhythm. Herringbone lays the pieces at right angles to each other in a zigzag; chevron cuts the ends so the pieces meet in a point. Both are set out from a centre line so the pattern lands symmetrically on the doorway, and both take longer than a plank floor of the same size, which is priced in. In a large open plan we often run Arte in the dining area inside a border of MAX or Elite in the same colour, so the two floors read as one wood with a change of pace.

The board underneath is the same as every Riva Spain plank — European white oak over Baltic birch, Bona lacquer, the construction described on the Riva line page — and it stands as full boards in the Riva building at the Bradenton showroom, where SRQ Modern is the authorized dealer and our own crews install it.