Practicality, design flair and two decades of experience have provided all the right ingredients for a striking new home in Prestons, Christchurch. The masterwork of Reade Wilson — Club GIB Installer, and Maintenance Supervisor for drywall contractors Cochrane and Associates — the three bedroom, three bathroom home celebrates Reade’s passion, expertise and attention to detail.

“Reade has had over 20 years in the industry and he has now poured all that experience and knowledge into building his own family home,” says Winstone Wallboards Area Sales Manager Steven Lindsay. “He has taken all his learnings and applied them to achieve the best level of finish without it costing a fortune, using a standard range of products but thinking outside the box in the way he uses them.”

In the open plan kitchen/living area a strategically placed control joint aligns perfectly with the expansion joint in the beautifully polished exposed concrete floors, creating an unobtrusive separation between the two spaces. Meanwhile in the hallway, control joints incorporate LED lighting, breaking up the vastness of the walls and creating a show-stopping feature playfully dubbed ‘the portal’.

A spectacular floating staircase connecting the two-level home is flanked by a glass balustrade on one side and a wall on the other. Light streams into the stairwell from the second storey windows but harsh critical light is dispersed with the help of a slightly stepped wall feature and more clever LED lighting.

Head upstairs to ‘the yacht club’ (a living area boasting views of the lake), and Reade’s understanding of critical lighting becomes even more apparent. GIB Rondo metal battens have created a pancake-flat ceiling and GIB-Cove has turned that ceiling into an art piece.

“Instead of just using GIB-Cove where the ceiling and walls meet, Reade has also used it as battens across the ceiling and to create a centrepiece for the pendant light. Not only does this look cool and funky, but it mitigates any critical light travelling across joins in the plasterboard, and it’s cost effective,” says Steven.

“Reade has a deep understanding of what critical light can do to ceilings and walls and he has used ingenious tricks to break up these surfaces. It’s all the thought around finer details like this that really sets this home apart. Reade has cleverly transformed practical must-haves into aesthetically pleasing features, building his home using the standard range of products but using his skills to make something amazing — and that’s exactly what he does for his customers too.”

Reade attributes a lot of the design inspiration to his father-in-law Keith Cochrane, who left school at 14, became a fibrous plasterer at 15, and founded Cochrane and Associates 33 years ago.

“Over the years Keith taught me that if you have a problem, you turn it into a feature, and that’s exactly what I’ve tried to do in this home,” says Reade. “I didn’t want to be staring at imperfections in the ceiling while I was trying to relax in the yacht club, or having an expansion joint sitting in the middle of our hallway wall. With a little bit of planning you can actually turn these potential issues into something really interesting.”

Since moving into the home last year, Reade and his wife Gemma and their two daughters have been in seventh heaven.

“We all just love the way the house feels — from the moment you open the front door you’re struck by an overwhelming sense of calm. And that’s not just a feeling I get, other people who come into our house also notice it. There’s a lot of concrete and glass so during the planning stages I was worried that we weren’t going to achieve that relaxed feel, but now that it’s finished, it’s that peacefulness that I am proudest of.”

And what has been the biggest driver in creating that sense of peace? Reade puts it down to the GIB Weatherline.

“It’s like having another layer of GIB around the outside of our house. It keeps the house at a stable temperature, so that it doesn’t overheat or get too cold. We’ve used the underfloor heating way less than we thought we would, and not having to think about using a heater has been magic.

“Meanwhile the acoustic properties are incredible. The GIB Weatherline soaks up all the noise from outside and doesn’t let it transition inside — and vice versa. The weekend after we moved in, my eldest daughter had her 17th birthday party. My wife and I popped out to pick up pizzas for everyone and when we pulled back into the driveway we wondered why they’d turned the music off. It wasn’t until we opened the front door and got blasted with loud music that we realised how soundproof our house was. It just blew my mind — with that level of decibels I thought you’d be able to hear the music from streets away!”