Rephouse: Another Australian Sporting Icon

A major feature of the recent $450 million Melbourne Cricket Ground redevelopment was the relocation and expansion of the Australian Gallery of Sport. The gallery is now a seven-day attraction, featuring interactive devices and a museum precinct now known as the National Sports Museum.

Leading exhibition designer Cunningham Martyn Design was commissioned to design the ground level reception area and the two display levels below, while producer Kim Fletcher had the massive task of bringing together a diverse range of exhibitions to tell the story of Australian sport through the ages. Given such diversity of space and content, one particular type of flooring was never going to be enough, which is why Rephouse Australia was called in to provide a range of commercial and sporting systems, so that visitors feel like they are moving from sporting field to sporting field, as well as from exhibition to exhibition.

Rephouse specialises in the design and manufacture of recycled rubber flooring systems for a very wide variety of applications. The company is best known in the Australian market for the extremely popular Neoflex™ range of recycled commercial rubber flooring, but Rephouse is also a world leader in indoor and outdoor sports and recreational systems, from IAAF certified running track systems and cushioned outdoor playing fields, to ultra-durable rubber playground tiles and the very popular Decoflex™ Universal multi-purpose indoor sports floor. The National Sports Museum includes a temporary section called Game On, a fully-interactive gallery where Rephouse Decoflex™ flooring systems allows visitors to enter the sporting arena. Visitors can personally experience the thrill of participation in sports such as cricket, Australian Rules Football, cycling, soccer, athletics and rugby, on the same sporting surface as the sportspeople themselves. The display uses Rephouse Neoflex™ 600, 700 and 800 series to create a replica cricket pitch, road surfacing and playing field; Decoflex™ D14 running track; Playflex Rubber tiles for the boxing ring and climbing wall; and Decoflex™ Universal for the interactive soccer, AFL and archery displays, as well as for the main interactive flooring. Throughout the Australian Sports Museum, all Rephouse flooring systems were chosen in the knowledge that their durability in sport performance could also handle the traffic of the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected to attend over the years to come.