You can’t have missed the stories this past summer of new townhouses overheating, with large west-facing windows and no shade or cross-ventilation. Some blamed new insulation standards, which frankly beggared belief.

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Speaking as the co-owner of an under-insulated 1907 villa, and writing this from our uninsulated office with its large northwest-facing window, I can attest that insulation is good.

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Now, the seasons have changed – suddenly, it seems – and we’re coming into autumn. The heat pumps go on in the mornings, and I’ve started eyeing up the wood pile. (“Not yet!” cried my wife. We’ll light it soon.) After a summer that seemed never to end, we remember that the winter stretches through four or five months in this country, and we’re reminded of how cold our houses often are.

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The thing is, even building to the minimum standards of the building code doesn’t buy you a comfortable home. So it seems worth talking about when we do go above code – when we build houses that are warm, comfortable and dry.

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Some people call it sustainability. I think we should call it common sense. We use words like high-performance, and that sounds really fancy – solar panels and home tech, and monitoring your house on an app. And if you’re into that, then fair enough. You do you.

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But the easy gains can be won with relatively simple interventions. “We stuffed insulation wherever we could,” Tony Calder told me when I interviewed him about his villa renovation in Ōtepoti. Other interventions were similarly prosaic: double glazing, and sealing the building envelope wherever possible.

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Funnily enough, when the team asked me about the theme for this issue, I said, possibly unhelpfully: “Winter is coming/warm/enclosing.” It was only later that I noticed how many of the featured houses had what you might call a sustainability angle. One deals with an overland flow path in the Waitākere Ranges, but sits high and dry in the sun. Tony Calder improved his house’s thermal performance by 200 percent. Craig Burt’s delightful family home is built to passive-house standards.

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Interesting, isn’t it? We wanted to make an issue about houses that felt warm and enclosing, but what played out in this issue was less about interiors or feelings, and more about the fundamentals of making a house comfortable.

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That says something, I think – something about our collective mindset, the need to make things safe, and the need to feel warm.

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