Polyflor in Melbourne: The Commercial and Safety Vinyl Ranges Alpha Stocks

If you are specifying a floor for a clinic, a school, a kitchen or an office, Polyflor is probably on your shortlist already. It is the largest brand Alpha carries, and that size is the problem: 22 ranges is a lot to work through when the names give little away.

This guide groups them the way they actually divide — safety floors, design ranges, and the stone and wood looks — and tells you what separates them. Where a range has a published slip rating, we give it, because that is usually the figure that decides a commercial job.

Who Polyflor is#

Polyflor makes commercial vinyl flooring: sheet and tile products built for spaces that take heavy foot traffic and need to be cleaned properly. That is a different brief from a domestic floor, and it shows in the ranges — several of them exist specifically to meet a slip-resistance requirement rather than to look a particular way.

For a Melbourne project this matters because commercial floors are usually chosen against a specification, not a mood board. A builder or designer comes in knowing they need a certain slip rating in a wet area, and the look is the second decision.

The practical consequence is that the Polyflor range does not sort neatly into good, better and best. A 6-colour range can be the right answer and a 48-colour range the wrong one, if the small range is the one that meets the rating. That is the opposite of how most flooring brands are chosen, and it is why this guide leads with the ratings rather than the looks.

What Alpha carries: 22 ranges, 390 colours#

Polyflor at Alpha runs to 22 ranges and 390 colours — the biggest brand on our shelves.

The larger ranges give you the most room to move on colour:

• Expona Flow — 48 colours
• Palettone — 41
• Expona Design — 27
• Classic Mystique PUR — 24
• XL PU — 23
• Stone fx — 22

One thing worth knowing before you browse: 17 of these 22 ranges also appear under Polyflor vinyl sheet, which is a second way into the same products rather than a different range. If you land there first you are seeing the same ranges, listed under the sheet category.

The five that appear only in the main vinyl listing are Expona Design, Expona Control, Expona Superplank, Genero Design and Miplank — the plank and tile formats rather than the sheet ones.

Polysafe: the safety floors, and what a slip rating means#

Six ranges answer a slip-resistance brief:

Slip resistance is measured as an "R" rating. It comes from a ramp test, and a higher number means more grip underfoot when the floor is wet or greasy. R9 is the lowest in common use, R12 is high. In practical terms: a dry office corridor does not need the highest-rated floor, and a commercial kitchen should not be given the lowest-rated one.

We do not publish per-range ratings here, and that is deliberate. A slip rating is a safety figure that a builder may specify against, so it should come to you in writing and current, not from a blog table. Tell us the rating your job requires and we will confirm in writing which of these ranges meets it.

It is worth saying what the rating is not. It is not a measure of how hard-wearing the floor is, or how easy it is to clean, and it does not tell you anything about how the floor looks. Two ranges can share the same rating and suit completely different jobs. The rating narrows your list; it does not choose for you.

The trade-off worth knowing is that rating and colour choice pull against each other in this group. Apex is the highest-rated of the six and has the fewest colours — 6. The ranges with the widest colour choice sit lower. So if your specification is strict, expect a shorter list of shades; if it is relaxed, you get more to choose from.

If a specification names a rating, start from the rating and let colour follow. Ask us for the current rating of any range in writing before you specify it — we will give you the figure for the product as it is supplied today.

A note on thickness, since it comes up with safety floors: Apex and Quicklay are thicker than the 2mm that most of this range runs at — 2.5mm and 2.2mm respectively. Those figures ARE published on each product page.

Expona: the four design ranges#

The Expona family is the design side of Polyflor — planks and tiles chosen for how they look, in commercial-grade construction.

• Expona Flow — 48 colours, the widest choice in the whole brand, 2mm. If you want design freedom and a slip rating together, this is the range to ask us about first.
• Expona Design — 27 colours and the thickest of the four at 3mm. Thickness in a commercial vinyl generally means a more substantial floor underfoot.
• Expona Superplank — 17 colours, plank format, for longer board looks.
• Expona Control — 11 colours at 2.5mm.

The honest way to use this family: pick on look and format first, then check the specification on the product page matches your job. Expona Flow is the one to start with if you have no constraint other than wanting choice.

Genero Design and Wood fx: the two searched by name#

Two ranges get looked up by name more than the rest, which usually means somebody has seen them specified or installed.

Genero Design — 10 colours, a 2.5mm tile and plank range. A smaller, more curated set than Expona.

Wood fx — 12 colours, 2mm, with a 0.70mm wear layer. A timber-look commercial vinyl that is also slip rated, a combination that suits aged care, clinics and schools where the space should not look clinical.

If you have arrived here searching for one of those two by name, both are stocked and both are linked above.

Stone, marble and the static-control option#

Three more ranges cover the hard-surface looks:

• Stone fx — 22 colours, stone looks with a safety rating.
• Marble Effects PUR — 6 colours.
• Palettone — 41 colours, the second-largest range in the brand.

Palettone is worth singling out for a reason beyond colour. In Polyflor's own description, the Palettone SD version is engineered to provide static control, intended for telecommunications installations, computer rooms and healthcare facilities. If you are looking for a floor for a room with static-sensitive equipment, this is the range to ask us about — and the detail is on the product page in the manufacturer's words rather than ours.

How to choose between them#

Four questions, in this order, will get you from 22 ranges to two or three.

Does a specification name a slip rating? If yes, that decides your shortlist — send us the rating and we will confirm in writing which ranges meet it. This question overrides everything else.

Is it a wet or greasy area? Kitchens, bathrooms, entries and commercial food spaces need a higher-rated floor than dry corridors and offices do. Tell us the area and we will match it.

Do you need a specific look? Timber look is Wood fx, Forest fx and the Expona plank ranges. Stone and marble are Stone fx and Marble Effects PUR. Plain colour is Palettone, Bloc and Classic Mystique PUR.

How much colour choice do you need? Expona Flow (48), Palettone (41) and Expona Design (27) are the three largest. At the other end, Apex and Marble Effects PUR have 6 each — fine when the specification matters more than the shade.

On prices: they are on the individual range pages, not here, because a commercial vinyl quote depends on the range, the colour, the area and the installation. Most of our Polyflor work is commercial, where the quote is written against the actual job.

See Polyflor at our Docklands showroom#

A slip rating is a number on a page; the floor itself is something you should stand on. We have the Polyflor range at our Docklands showroom, where you can feel the difference between a standard and a high-grip surface underfoot, compare a 2mm sheet against a 3mm Expona Design tile, and see how the timber looks read under real light rather than in a photograph.

If you are working to a specification, bring it. It is much faster to narrow 22 ranges down with the required rating in front of us than to work backwards from a colour you have already fallen for.

Get in touch to arrange a time or to ask for a written quote. If the project is an apartment rather than a commercial fit-out, our guide to choosing flooring for Docklands apartments covers the building-approval side as well.