I've ordered Armstrong Alvina Buff sheet flooring for the King's bath. This is nice looking, not too distressed looking (not distressed at all actually--it could be brand new stone decking around a built-in hot tub, but made of slightly weathered stones), and yet looks (and actually feels) quite grippy. It has variable texturing everywhere and the grout lines are noticeable and fairly dense. At the same time, it's vinyl not stone, so is actually fairly smooth (despite the slight bumpiness on the order of a millimeter or two), and doesn't have hard edges you might hurt your feet on (if it were real stone decking). It' has a nice amount of give to it for cushioning by design. Padded smooth flooring with very slight and variable bumpy texturing for grippiness is perfect for a bathroom, I think. And the colors go well with my Calacatta Porcelain shower, my Kohler Almond bath and toilet, my golden beige wall paint (same as in King's room) and black (for vanity and such).
I just don't get why people like tile floors. They are cold, hard, and slippery usually. The only reasonable way to do a bathroom tile floor is with very small tiles and a high proportion of grout lines. Then you get at least some friction when wet. But they're still cold and hard. Hard floors are hard on feet, ankles, and ligaments--giving you heel spurs and the like. I like to walk around the house in bare feet, and so I love padded flooring. The master bathroom is the most important place for bare feet after the master bedroom, since even if I were to wear shoes elsewhere in the house, I'd still be barefoot mostly within the master suite while I'm getting bathed, dressed, or undressed. Now it's true that within the shower itself it's a good idea to wear flip flops. I do that mostly these days. However there is always a time when one is putting on or off the flip flops when the floor could still be wet. Preventing slipping is a very valuable floor feature.
I think people like tile because they believe it's easier to clean. Or that it's permanent. The permanence part may be true, though eventually everything will be replaced or refurbished (the tile in a vintage house might be saved but re-grouted after 100 years). But nowadays other floors can last sufficient long that it barely matters anymore. WRT cleaning, why is that so important? Any good floor can be pretty easily cleaned, as long as you don't wait a few years to let the dirt bake in. A monthly housekeeper can keep all the floors from getting baked in dirt, and I've gotten used to having a monthly housekeeper for that and other reasons--I wouldn't want to go back to not having one.
A quality vinyl floor can last 30 years or more. My original bathroom floor probably had a 5 year warranty and is still OK after 31 years. I'm only replacing it because it got torn during the new bathtub installation, and since a new toilet has yet to be installed, it's the perfect time to install a new floor.
With a tile floor, over the course of 30 years you might be looking at several "grout sealing" operations would would add up to the cost of a new vinyl floor, let alone the fact that the tile floor was a couple of times more expensive in the first place. A new bathroom vinyl floor isn't actually very expensive. And then you get the fun of choosing something entirely different in 15-30 years. Or not.
I am only disappointed the Alvina Buff has the 15 year warranty instead of the 20, 25, or lifetime warranty. But none of the longer warranty vinyls have as grippy looking a pattern. Instead they often look like smooth large format tiles with deep distressing. The grout lines are too far apart to be of much assistance and it's hard to tell from photos how much grippiness the deep distressing provides. But they don't look as grippy, and I'm guessing and believing he look is accurate as the cause makes sense. The higher warranty floors have thicker but also smoother wear layer. A thicker layer can't make as much curvature, so less dense texturing is possible, and likely the grippiness is less too. A layered flooring product has to bend the entire wear layer; you can't add layers on top for texturing because those might peel off. The whole surface has to bend, and the thicker it is, the harder it is to bend or make bent.
The Alvina flooring has 10mm wear layer, as does the other most highly textured pattern Bleeker Street, Armstrong has two higher grades up to 20mm (the 20mm being very new to Armstrong), but those all look less textured, and the top line Congloleum I was interested in, but dismissed because it didn't look grippy, has a 20mm wear layer.
There was only one other pattern in the Armstrong catalog that looked possibly even more grippy is one with small squares, perhaps about 1 inch.
One example of this pattern is the Montauk which has an appropriate color G3A93. Another example is Bleeker Street Uptown. The density of the grout lines suggests this would be most grippy, maybe even more grippy than the Alvina. But I don't find these patterns attractive. When you zoom in on them, they are very distressed looking, as if they were snapshots of real sidewalks in some US city. Not only is there mottling, there is some whitish stuff that looks a bit like baked on bird turds.
In principle vinyl flooring can be made to look like anything, pristine or distressed. Why are almost all the patterns now distressed, and often horribly distressed like Montauk and Bleeker Street?
It was also hard to tell from the photos, but it looked a lot like the grout lines on these faux-street vinyls are raised instead of depressed. That would have a tendency to trap water, possibly not good. I can't tell from the pictures if that is actually true, and even if it is true, the raised grout lines would still have added traction, perhaps a lot of added traction. But it was really the awful close up look that made me decide against them. And they have the same 15 year warranty as the Alvina Buff that I'm getting. Also the same floor technology, Fiberglass Masterworks Technology 3D with VTx. That makes for a floor with good texturing, and therefore presumably good grip. I think the fiberglass should be long lasting also, meaning the texturing will stay like new for a long time. My old flooring had decent texturing originally but has gotten nearly flat.
I was unable to find any discussion online about the grippiness of vinyl floors. AFAIK vinyl flooring has inherently more grip than typical ceramic or porcelain tile. But it would still be nice to have numbers. Ceramic and porcelain tile have a Wet Coefficient of Friction (wCOF) specification which is useful for comparison. But an actual tile floor made out of such tiles would have a different effective grip depending on the spacing and thickness of grout lines. The grout can be a much more important factor than the tile itself, and yet nowhere do you get an "overall" rating of a particular tile/tile-size/grout with regards to grip. Even a coefficient of friction alone is not a sufficient way of describing an actual floor, because the wCOF varies according to position, and not all patterns of such wCOF variation are equally useful in preventing slip, which is a complex and dynamic process. My own sense is that although vinyl floors don't have the highly varying COF and level of real tile floors, vinyl texturing is more important than you might think if your thinking is based on static calculations. As one is gaining traction, the smallest textured point can be taken advantage of with transient downward force. On my old vinyl floors, I think they would be useless without their fairly dense texturing.
Really you need something more like real world testing, though I'm not suggesting inducing actual slips. Some kind of synthetic test…or just subjective feel objectively recorded, might be the best we can do. I was thinking about measuring the distance of slip with a footlike object after the floor is evenly sprinkled with a coating of water. Not just one measurement, but an very large number in random locations and directions. From which an "average slip" would be computed. But a complicating factor is that it would vary according to weight a lot. So one would have to do the test with a range of different weights also. And then not just "slip direction" but also a random "direction of force". And then variation of force. Ultimately you might need to do a gazillion measurements.
The random pattern of Armstrong Alvina (with random relatively dense grout lines and varying stone look textures) flooring suggests to me it would do well with a hypothetical random slip test. Other tiles which simulate large format stone tiles--a very popular theme in the most expensive vinyl flooring--might not do so well, because in anything like a linear direction you slip a long way to the first grout line.
Deciding on the Alvina pattern was difficult, because I had to defend it in my own mind against a more classical bathroom flooring pattern, or at least what is seen a lot now, using large format stone or porcelain tile pattern. It was also easier to find those faux large stone patterns in compatible colors.
My favorite among the large stone patterns (and actually my favorite looking tile of all) is Congoleum's Berlin Oyster Bar. They show it in a bathroom scene which looks elegant and totally gorgeous. It has a lifetime warranty, a thick wear layer with aluminum oxide, and silver for microbial action. This is a top line vinyl (the Armstrong Alvina is only midline), it looks great, it works with my colors obviously (it was not so obvious with the Alvina Buff, I had hopes, but all the same it wasn't clear if it had too much orange or not…now I believe after studying many pictures and print outs right next to the tile that it does not).
But THE thing which killed the Berlin Oyster Bar was my concern about how grippy it is. For starters, an actual stone tile floor like that would not be very grippy at all, or certainly not when new anyway. It has the highly distressed look (which in this case I find OK because of the cool and random coloration) which suggests some added grip over a brand new stone floor. But maybe not much. And the grout lines are of no help at all being so widely spaced.
Too bad, I suppose, that I didn't have time to test a sample of the Congoleum. But I felt that even if the distressed stone has a texture like sandpaper, when wet it wouldn't help much. Though possibly, in actual use, the Congoleum would do fine because of the cushioning. This is in their Air Step Vibe series which should have impressive cushioning (though I don't really know how it compares with the various Armstrong vinyls). That cushioning adds grip, but it's hard to know how much without testing.
There were many other top line stone look vinyls made by Armstrong and Congoleum that might have worked. Distressed stone look is the most popular pattern in the most expensive vinyls, and the lightest color of every pattern had a chance of working with my Calacatta shower tile. Among all I saw (and I tried to look at the full catalogs) the Berlin Oyster Bar had the best look and coloration. But I worried that none of them would have sufficient grip.
I'd buy the vinyl with a longer warranty if I could mainly because it would likely wear better over time. Actually collecting on a vinyl flooring warranty is another matter, probably not worth losing any sleep due to being stuck with shorter warranty. Usually most vinyl floors are replaced not because of "ordinary wear" (as would be covered but likely pro-rated in most warranties) but because of an adverse rip or tear (as just happened during the bathtub installation) which would not be covered anyway.
Now it's not surprising that a random grippier pattern might not wear as well anyway. But it also appears that because of being a midline tile, the Armstrong Alvina Buff has a thinner wear layer. Now it's also possible that a thicker wear layer might be too difficult or costly with the grippier pattern. In examining both Armstrong and Congoleum catalogs, I found no exceptions, in all cases the vinyls with the grippiest patterns were not available in the longest warranties, and the patterns with the longest warranties were either large format stone or wood, neither of which looked very grippy.
It was very hard to tell this from on screen photos, which are hard to compare. But printing out both the Berlin Oyster Bar and the Alvina Buff showed them both to have compatible colors with my bathroom, with the Alvina being just a bit less good for the Calacatta but better on everything else, and also favoring the general golden tone (the Oyster Bar coloration has some useless-to-me blue in it and only weakly accepts black and gold tones). So actually, from what I've seen in prints, I like the Alvina Buff coloration better, a little, in my bathroom. But I do worry that the actual flooring may have more orange. It already pushes the limit a bit on that (Orange and Calacatta don't go that well--and my Kohler Almond already pushes that to the limit also), but harmonizes with calacatta due to random elements with white/black/purple. The Berlin Oyster Bar never pushes the orange problem in the first place, but only weakly accepts black.
I quipped above that when one ultimately does replace a vinyl floor, it's an opportunity to try something different, or not to try something different. Well actually I love the pattern of my existing vinyl floors in kitchen and both bathrooms. The pattern is of 1.5 inch hexagon tiles with slight distressing and wide grout lines. I don't know how the floors were originally (my mother and I bought the house when it was already 8 years old and noticeably abused) but even now they have some grip…and it is largely because of the close spaced faux grout lines.
Now even if I could get an exact replacement for the bathroom vinyl, I wouldn't buy it because the color is not quite right for the Calacatta. I was planning on living with the mismatch (until it became clear I'd need to replace the floor) but it wouldn't be worth repeating giving the new shower tile. The color is too yellow/orange for the calacatta.
But what might have been cool would have been a similar hex tile with gold veined calacatta. I've seen real gold calacatta in hex matrix for sale. That would be cool but high maintenance.
But I am puzzled why the basic hex tile pattern seems to have completely disappeared from both the Armstrong and Congoleum catalogs. It is a grippy yet elegant pattern with infinite variations possible in color and distressing. Has it become too 1980's? To me it seems like a timeless pattern, and if it had been available in a grippy top line vinyl I might have preferred that to the random Alvina--which has a kind of casual mountain lodge or vacation spa look which maybe I will get more used to but wasn't really something I had been seeking.
In my mind, though, I've created this image where my bathroom door is really the gateway to The Spa. The highlight in the Spa is the Shower/Bath. Though the Shower Bath is an elegant classical structure, the floor that leads there is modern casual. Welcome to my eclectic palace (and this is hardly the exception)!
