‘Virtually no protection’: Why Australian homes are so cold

Australia might be a sunburned country, but in winter, the cold reality bites: Our homes are not built to withstand the chill. This realisation has come into focus as thousands of people have left their heated high-rise offices to work from home during the pandemic.

“Sometimes I have to shower just to get warm,” says Rachel Pieris, a lawyer who has been working from a weatherboard house in Stanmore since June, the same month Sydney clocked its coldest day in 37 years. “It’s much more noticeable now that I’m remote. I have to wear thermals, blast the heater, and keep a heat pack at my feet – and I can still feel the cold air seeping under the window frame.”

She’s not the only one who is shivering through lockdown. At its peak, searches for space heaters increased by 44 per cent in June 2021 compared to the average for the last four winters. As more of us are spending time inside it begs the question: Why are our houses so cold?

“Australian housing types like terraces originate from England [but] they haven’t really been adapted for the climate here,” says Sam Marshall, founder of award-winning firm Architect Marshall and lecturer of the Faculty of the Built Environment at UNSW. As a result, they’re both hotter in summer and cooler in winter. It doesn’t help that reflective foil insulation for external walls wasn’t a requirement until 1991, and that bulk insulation became mandatory in 2005, which means many older homes don’t meet basic requirements.

While new homes are comparatively better, Dr Trivess Moore, senior lecturer at RMIT University’s School of Property, Construction and Project Management says the standard is low. “The majority of new houses in Australia are only built to meet the minimum building code requirements which are not sufficient to deliver year round thermal comfort, especially with a changing climate,” he says. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one public health professor went so far as to call Australian houses “glorified tents” compared with homes in Sweden, pointing out that temperatures inside a “flimsy” Queenslander dip below 18 degrees Celsius while Swedish houses remain at a comfortable 23 degrees, no matter the season.

“In Europe they tend to seal everything up so you can control the climate. But in Australia, we like the fresh air, we like the breeze,” says Marshall. That warm-weather mentality – and the design features Australians embrace, like open-plan layouts and large shuttered windows to encourage cross-ventilation – works against us in winter.

“The most vulnerable part of your house are windows.”

Sam Marshall, founder of Architect Marshall and lecturer of the Faculty of the Built Environment at UNSW

Culturally, it’s compounded by a “toughen up” mentality that sees the cold as something fleeting to be endured. Danielle Mitchell noticed the difference in attitude when she returned to Sydney after living in New York for five years. “The cold is embraced as part of the city’s culture in the US,” she says. Even pre-war buildings feature double (or triple) glazed windows to block sound and retain warmth, and most apartments have a centralised boiler which distributes steam. By law, heat must register at 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) between 6am and 10pm when the outside temperature falls below 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius).

Of course, Australia’s climate isn’t as extreme as North-Eastern states like New York, but different building standards and attitudes mean that in some cases, we suffer through colder conditions. Mitchell monitored the temperature inside her 1950s cottage in Thornleigh after she noticed that her four-month-old daughter woke throughout the night with freezing hands. “Our bedroom got down to 12 degrees Celsius on some evenings,” she says. “That’s when we made the call to insulate.”