Riva Metro — 6¾-inch European white oak plank

Metro is the narrower board, at six and three-quarter inches, and it is for the rooms where a wide plank would be too much of the picture: a townhouse, an apartment, a smaller footprint where the floor should carry the room rather than dominate it. The boards still run to eight feet, so the floor keeps its length even where it gives up some width — the proportion of a traditional strip floor with the joints of a modern one, and none of the cupping a solid strip floor does over a slab.

It comes in Character grade only — the board that shows its knots and the movement in the grain — and in four of the twelve colours: Pearl, Cotton, Crystal and Smoke, the light end of the range. A narrow board in a pale colour is the classic combination for a smaller, brighter room, and that is what the format is built around.

Where it goes: the condo on the island, the guest house, the second-floor bedrooms, a townhouse with rooms that are long rather than wide. In a narrow room we run the boards the long way, which is where a narrower plank helps — the room reads as longer, not as a ladder of joints. Character grade suits these rooms because a smaller floor with no variation in it can look printed; the knots and the colour shift give it the texture of real wood at close range, which is the range at which a small room is seen.

Metro and Elite are the same oak, the same core and the same finish; the choice between them is the size of the room and how much of the picture the floor should be. Bring the plan to the gallery and we will lay a few boards of each on the floor beside each other, which settles it faster than any description — and if the house has both a compact upstairs and an open ground floor, running Metro above and Elite below in one colour is a combination that reads as one floor from the stair.

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.