Walk through almost any flooring showroom in Dubai and you will be steered toward wide planks. Sometimes 220 mm wide, often more, occasionally a frankly oversized 300 mm. The pitch is the same in every showroom: wider planks make a room feel bigger, more luxurious, more modern. We have sat through that pitch ourselves, on both sides of the counter.
It is wrong more often than it is right.
In a Dubai apartment of 80 to 120 square metres, which is most of them, a wide plank does the opposite of what the salesperson promises. The plank repeats too few times across the room. The eye reads each plank as a separate object rather than a continuous surface. The space ends up looking carved into pieces, not unified.
Where wide planks actually work
They are made for large, open-plan rooms. Villas, lateral apartments, the kind of space where a single plank can run six or seven metres without ever needing to be cut down to length. In that scale, the proportions read correctly and the wider face genuinely does feel calmer and more confident than narrow.
If your living area is under 40 square metres, narrow is almost always the right call. Around 150 to 180 mm wide. The pattern repeats often enough to read as a continuous floor, the proportions match the room, and the planks visually echo the older European apartment buildings that the contemporary Mediterranean look borrows from. They also let you turn the floor into a directional element, running the planks toward a feature wall or window, which is much harder to do on a wide plank without it looking dominant.
What we recommend
Walk into your room and look at the longest unbroken wall. If it is under 5 metres, choose narrow. If it is over 7 metres, you can credibly go wide. In between, it is a judgement call about furniture density and ceiling height.
And if all of that feels like a lot to weigh in a showroom, here is the heuristic we use ourselves: when in doubt, narrow. Wide planks impose a look. Narrow planks let the room decide.