Preference Floors Melbourne | Range Guide

Most people who walk into our Docklands showroom are not choosing a brand. They are choosing between engineered timber, laminate and hybrid — and they want to know which one suits a Melbourne home, a rental, or a room where water gets spilled.

Preference Floors is the brand we stock most widely across all three of those, plus bamboo. This guide compares the ranges we actually hold, so you can work out which type of floor you want first, and which range within it second.

Choosing a floor type before choosing a brand#

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this order:

Pick the floor type — based on the room, the moisture, the traffic and the budget.
Then pick the range — based on the colour and the finish you like.

Working the other way around is how people end up with real timber in a laundry, or a budget laminate in a formal living room. The sections below are organised that way on purpose.

Who Preference Floors is#

Preference Floors is an Australian flooring supplier. Their own site is at preferencefloors.com.au if you want to read about the company directly.

What matters for a Melbourne buyer is breadth. Most brands we carry specialise in one or two floor types. Preference spans six, which is why they turn up in nearly every comparison we do — and why a single brand can cover a whole house where the bedrooms, the kitchen and the hallway all want something different.

What Alpha carries across six floor types#

We hold 20 Preference ranges. Here is where they sit:

Engineered timber — 5 ranges, 85 colours
Laminate — 5 ranges, 73 colours
Hybrid — 4 ranges, 56 colours
Hybrid herringbone — 1 range, 8 colours
Engineered herringbone — 1 range, 5 colours
Plus four more ranges under a second set of pages, covered further down

One practical note before you start browsing: this brand sits at two different addresses on our site. Most of it is under /preference, and a further four ranges — including the bamboo and the solid Australian timber — are under /preference-floors. Both are linked from this guide, so you do not have to hunt for the second one.

Engineered timber: real oak, five ranges#

Engineered timber has a real hardwood top layer over a stable core. It looks and sands like solid timber, but handles Melbourne's humidity swings better than a solid board does.

Our five ranges, with their colour choice:

Prestige Oak — 42 colours, by far the widest choice we hold in any Preference range. If you are matching an existing floor, start here.
De Marque Oak — 9 colours
Hardwood Collection — 12 colours
Pronto Engineered Oak — 8 colours
De Marque Oak Herringbone — 14 colours, the pattern version of the De Marque line

Where it suits: living areas, bedrooms, formal spaces — anywhere the look of real timber matters and the floor will not be standing in water.

Laminate: five ranges, including Oakleaf HD Plus#

Laminate is a printed surface over a dense board. Modern printing is good enough that most people cannot pick it at a glance, and it costs less than engineered timber.

Aquastop — 24 colours, the widest laminate choice we hold
Oakleaf Laminate — 14 colours
Aspect 72hr Water-Resistant Laminate — 14 colours
Oakleaf HD Plus — 13 colours
Preference Classic — 8 colours

Oakleaf HD Plus is the range Melbourne customers ask about by name more than any other laminate we stock. The "HD" refers to the print quality — a higher-definition grain than standard laminate, which is what makes it hard to tell from timber in a photograph.

Where it suits: bedrooms, hallways, rentals and investment properties — rooms that need to look good and take knocks without the cost of real timber.

Hybrid: four ranges, including Easi Plank SPC#

Hybrid is the waterproof option. It is the one we recommend when someone describes a kitchen, a laundry, a bathroom, or a home with young children and pets.

Easi Plank SPC — 21 colours
Aspire RCB — 15 colours
Hydroplank WPC — 12 colours
Lifestyle Collection EPC — 8 colours

Easi Plank SPC is the hybrid people search for by name. The letters describe the core: SPC is a stone-based core, WPC a wood-based one. SPC is the harder and more dimensionally stable of the two; WPC is softer and quieter underfoot. If you are deciding between Easi Plank and Hydroplank, that is the real difference, not the colour.

Where it suits: wet areas, whole-house installs where one floor runs through the kitchen, and any room where spills are routine. Our guide to waterproof flooring for Melbourne bathrooms and kitchens goes deeper on that comparison.

Herringbone, bamboo and the solid-timber lines#

Herringbone — the angled parquet pattern — comes in two Preference lines:

Easi Plank Herringbone — 8 colours, waterproof hybrid in a herringbone pattern
Pronto Engineered Oak — 5 colours, real oak in herringbone

The hybrid version gets you the pattern in a wet area; the engineered version gets you real timber. Our herringbone guide covers the pattern itself.

And the second brand home. Four further ranges sit under separate pages:

Bamboo — 14 colours
Select Australian Timber — 6 colours
Fiddleback Herringbone — 5 colours
Engineered Timber Flooring — 6 colours

These are genuinely different products from the ranges above, not the same ones listed twice. Bamboo in particular is worth a look if you want a hard, fast-growing timber alternative.

How to choose between them#

A short way through it:

Does the room get wet? Hybrid. Start with Easi Plank SPC or Hydroplank WPC.
Do you want real timber underfoot? Engineered. Start with Prestige Oak for the colour range.
Is budget the main constraint? Laminate. Oakleaf HD Plus for the print quality, Aquastop for the widest choice.
Is it a rental or investment? Laminate or hybrid — easier and cheaper to replace between tenancies. Our investor's guide covers what lasts.
Do you want the herringbone pattern? Decide wet or dry first, then pick the matching line.
Matching an existing floor? Go to the widest ranges — Prestige Oak at 42 colours, then Aquastop at 24.

On prices: they are on the individual range pages, not here. Each range is priced by colour, format and the size of the job, so a single number in a guide would mislead you. Follow any link above, or ask us for a written quote.

See Preference Floors at our Docklands showroom#

Twenty ranges is a lot to judge from a screen. Timber and laminate both photograph differently from how they look in a room, under your own light.

Our showroom is at 351 Docklands Dr, Docklands VIC 3008, open Monday to Saturday 9am–5pm. Bring the room measurements, any colour you are matching, and a sense of how the room gets used — that last one decides the floor type more often than the colour does.