Canterbury owner-builder Jono Wilson chooses Stonebloc for privacy, noise abatement, and a look that suits the house that's been in his family for generations.
Jono Wilson knows this property better than anyone. He was born on it. He bought it from his parents, finished building the house just before the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and has been quietly working on it with his wife ever since.
That last major thing is a 605-block, 193-tonne Stonebloc gravity retaining wall — designed, redesigned, and installed by Jono and his wife themselves.
A HEDGE, A MOUND, AND A BETTER IDEA
The project started with a hedge that had to come out. Jono needed to replace the privacy and noise abatement it had given the property, but he didn’t want to throw up a bigger mound to do it.
“Instead of building a bigger mound, we decided to cut the existing mound in half and take it out to the boundary,” he explains. “The product we found from Envirocon seemed ideal for that, being a gravity retaining wall.”
He looked at several systems before landing on Stonebloc. The decisive factors were aesthetic and practical.
“We liked it, the size of it was sympathetic with the honed stone block we had on the house, and clearly we like concrete. My wife and I installed it ourselves because we’ve got the equipment to lift and move it around — that was part of the enjoyment of doing something yourself.”
DESIGNING IN ENVIROBUILD
The wall didn’t arrive at its final form in a single sitting. Jono used Envirocon’s Envirobuild 3D design software to iterate — testing layouts, swapping block sizes, and refining the look until it sat right against the house.
“Originally, I started out with quite a simple wall,” he says. “But sitting with the software, I thought, ‘I wonder what it’d look like if I did this.’ It evolved as we went along.”
The final design uses Ironbark posts between sections to break up the wall, hide existing concrete buttresses from a build fifteen years earlier, and create a deliberate negative detail. “We end up making it look like we knew what we were doing right from the start.”
HEAVY RESIDENTIAL, LIGHT CIVIL
For Jono, Stonebloc sat in exactly the right product category. He considered Interbloc first, but the one-tonne blocks were beyond what his skid steer could safely lift.
“Stonebloc® is a much better product for the aesthetic we wanted. Interbloc® — the keys go right through them, so they look a bit more industrial. Stonebloc® came down low enough into that realm of heavy residential, light civil, that we could handle ourselves.”
The Croatia texture was the right finish for the site. Sleek, smooth, and modern, it complemented the existing house without tipping into industrial territory.
LIKE BIG LEGO
Once the foundation was right, the rest of the build became — in Jono’s words — straightforward.
“Once you get those base blocks down in the right orientation, the rest of it is just build it up. It’s literally like playing with big Lego.”
That modularity also gave Jono something most retaining systems don’t: the ability to undo a mistake. When the first wall section looked wrong against the road’s grade, he and his wife pulled the whole thing apart, had the foundation re-cut, and rebuilt it.
“That was really good — you can pull things apart and put them back together. If they were grouted or bolted, you couldn’t. We just pulled things off, did the work, and put it all back.”
A WALL FOR THE LONG VIEW
Across roughly 660 blocks, 21 truckloads, and 190 tonnes of concrete, Stonebloc has given Jono a wall that fits the property, suits the house, and will outlast him. Native plantings will sit on a plateau of backfill behind the wall, growing up to restore the privacy lost with the hedge.
“The concrete reflects sound a lot better than the hedge ever did. When the trucks go past now, you can hear the difference — louder, softer, louder, softer — as they pass the gateway.”
The Wilson project still has a season or two of backfilling, planting, and finishing ahead of it. But the core build — the part Stonebloc was chosen for — is almost done.
“This is the last major thing to do,” Jono says.
