New Zealand learned about weathertightness the hard way. A generation of homes built in a short window let water into places it was never meant to reach, and thousands of families paid for it years later. The lesson stuck with anyone who was building through it, and it shapes how we work to this day.
The hard truth is that weathertightness is almost entirely invisible once a home is finished. You can’t photograph a well-built junction. You can only see the result decades later, when the home is still dry and the one next door is not.
A house keeps the weather out at its joints, not its surfaces. The detail nobody sees is the detail that matters most.
Where homes actually leak
Water rarely comes through a wall. It comes through the places where one thing meets another: where a window sits in its opening, where a deck meets the building, where the roof changes direction, where a pipe passes through the cladding. Every one of those junctions is a decision, and every decision is a chance to do it properly or to do it quickly.
- Window and door openings. The flashings and tapes around an opening do the quiet work of shedding water back to the outside. Get the sequence wrong and you’ve built a funnel.
- Decks and balconies. Anywhere a flat, walkable surface meets a wall is a junction that deserves real care, especially over living space.
- Roof penetrations and changes in direction. Every pipe, flue and valley is a spot where water concentrates and has to be managed deliberately.
- The cavity behind the cladding. A drained, ventilated cavity gives any water that does get in a way back out. It’s standard practice now, and we don’t cut it short.
Why the guarantee matters here
Weathertightness problems are the classic example of a defect that surfaces years after handover. It's exactly the kind of long-tail risk the Halo 10-Year Residential Guarantee is built to cover, which is part of why every Edgecity home carries one.
You can’t inspect it back in later
The reason we go on about this at the design stage is simple: once the linings are on, the detailing is sealed inside the wall. You can’t add care after the fact. The only way to get it right is to plan the junctions properly, build them in the right order, and have someone on site who actually understands why the sequence matters.
That’s the part of building that doesn’t make the photos and doesn’t sell the home, but it’s the part we’d want done right in our own house. So that’s the standard we hold on yours.
If you’re planning a build and want a builder who treats the invisible details as seriously as the visible ones, start a conversation.