It is 34 degrees in Notting Hill. You are standing in a beautifully restored four-bedroom Victorian townhouse with original cornicing, engineered oak floors and a kitchen that took six months to design. The asking price is £4.5 million.
There is no aircon.
If you are British, you probably shrug. If you have just flown in from Dubai, Singapore or New York, you have questions.
It is worth having an honest conversation about why this is still happening — because the answer is more interesting than “the British are bad at summer,” even if that is also true.
The architecture was the aircon
Georgian and Victorian houses were not designed for the climate that London now has. They were designed for the climate London used to have — cold, damp, reliably grey. The thick masonry walls, the high ceilings, the sash windows that draw air through from front to back –these were not aesthetic choices. They were the original cooling system, and for most of the building’s life, they worked perfectly well.
The problem is that the climate has changed and the buildings have not. A sash window that was designed to manage a British summer in 1850 is doing rather less useful work in a summer that regularly hits 35 degrees.
Then there is the planning system
A significant proportion of the prime London housing stock that OB works with sits in conservation areas, on protected estates or carries a listed building designation. The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair. The Holland Park conservation area. Virtually all of Notting Hill’s most desirable streets. These designations exist for good reason – they are why London looks the way it does – but they also mean that bolting an external aircon unit to the facade of your stucco-fronted townhouse is not simply a matter of calling a contractor. In many cases it is not possible at all.
The result is that even buyers who want aircon and can easily afford it find themselves living without it, not because of indifference but because the planning system has not caught up with the climate.
The cultural dimension
There is also, it has to be said, a cultural dimension. Aircon has historically felt vaguely un-British to a certain generation of homeowner – the kind of thing you have in offices and hotels but not in a proper house. Suffering through the heat with the windows open and a fan from John Lewis has been worn as a badge of honour in a way that would baffle most of the world.
That is changing. But slowly.
What we are seeing in the market
International buyers – particularly those arriving from the Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States – find the absence of climate control in a multimillion pound London home genuinely difficult to understand. We have had viewings where the question of aircon has come up before the question of square footage. For buyers who have spent their lives in cities where summer means 40 degrees and every building is climate controlled as a basic matter of course, the idea that a £5 million house might not have it feels like an oversight rather than a feature.
It is becoming a genuine differentiator in the prime London market. Properties with discreet, well-integrated climate control systems are commanding a premium – not a dramatic one, but a real one. And the conversation is happening earlier in the search process than it used to.
London is catching up
The good news is that the technology has improved significantly. Discreet cassette systems, underfloor cooling, reversible heat pumps that satisfy planning requirements — the options for retrofitting a period property without compromising its character or falling foul of conservation rules have expanded considerably in the last five years.
The best properties being refurbished in Mayfair and Notting Hill right now are specifying climate control as standard, not as an afterthought. The buyers who will purchase them in five years will not know it was ever any other way.
London’s housing stock was built for a different climate. The summers have changed. The architecture is catching up. Slowly, grudgingly and very quietly – which is, of course, the most British way to do it.
