Riva Elite — 8-inch European white oak plank

Elite is the eight-inch board — wide enough to read as a modern floor, narrow enough that a hallway, a bedroom or a smaller condo does not feel over-scaled by its own flooring. It is the format that carries the full palette: all twelve colours, including the two darkest, Gray and Black, which MAX does not offer.

Because it is the middle width it is also the one that runs most comfortably through a whole house — the great room in the same board as the bedrooms, without the wide plank's demand on the slab or the narrow plank's busyness in a large space. Most of the whole-house jobs we install are Elite.

Prime grade gives the quiet, even board; Character grade lets the oak show its knots and colour variation. Both are the same construction and the same finish.

Where it goes: the whole house. Bedrooms and hallways take it without the floor becoming the loudest thing in the room; the great room takes it without looking like a corridor. It is also the format for the colours at the ends of the range — Black and Gray for a cool, modern palette, Cigar and Amber for a warm, traditional one — because at eight inches a dark board still reads as boards rather than as a dark slab. Laid straight, staggered, and usually run the long way of the main room.

One floor through a house makes the transitions matter more than the boards do: the threshold at the sliders, the change to tile at a bathroom door, the step down to a lanai. Each of those is drawn before anything is ordered so the oak meets the next surface flush, at the same height, rather than with a strip screwed over the gap — which is the detail that separates a floor that was planned from one that was fitted.

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.