Old Cottages Can Teach Us About Resilient Living in a Heatwave

Amanda Lennon
Jul 15
4 min read

Why Old Houses Keep Their Cool (and Why We Still Love Them)

It's been hard to miss the headlines this past week.

As temperatures have climbed, newspapers and broadcasters have been filled with stories of modern homes and flats becoming uncomfortably hot, leaving many people struggling to keep cool. With climate scientists warning that heatwaves are likely to become more frequent and more intense, it's becoming clear that this isn't simply an unusually warm summer—it's part of a changing climate that we're all learning to live with.

Watching the news from inside our Yorkshire cottage has been a timely reminder that, sometimes, older ways of building still have something to teach us.

Stepping Through the Door

Step outside Chaos Cottage and the July sun is relentless. The vegetable garden is thirsty, the dogs have claimed every shady corner they can find, and the blackcurrants seem to ripen almost overnight.

Step back inside, though, and everything changes.

The cottage remains remarkably cool. Thick stone walls, deep-set windows and natural ventilation work together in a way that generations of builders understood long before anyone had heard of air conditioning. The walls absorb heat slowly during the day and release it gradually when temperatures fall overnight, creating a home that naturally moderates the extremes of the weather.

Of course, no home is perfect. Old cottages take a fair bit of maintenance, the floors slope in places, and there's always another little repair waiting to be tackled. We certainly don't pretend that living in a house that's more than 200 years old is always straightforward.

But perhaps that's also why these buildings continue to endure. They were built to work with their surroundings rather than relying entirely on technology to make them comfortable.

What Resilient Living Means to Us

As our climate changes, I've begun to appreciate something else this old cottage offers: the foundations for resilient living.

To me, resilient living isn't about preparing for disaster or trying to become completely self-sufficient. It's about creating a home that's a little more adaptable, a little less wasteful and a little less dependent on any single system.

Over the past few years we've quietly made changes that support that way of living. Our solar panels and battery storage mean that, if the electricity goes off during one of the increasingly common weather-related power cuts, we can still keep the house running for at least a day, longer if we only power essentials. We have more than one way to cook, whether that's using the barbecue outside on a summer's evening or the old stove set into the fireplace.

Our vegetable garden, orchard and soft fruit don't make us self-sufficient, but they do help us eat with the seasons, reduce food miles and appreciate where our food comes from. There's a quiet reassurance in knowing that supper might come from the garden rather than the supermarket. The same can be said of the flowers. Commercial cut flowers have a huge carbon footprint - 86% of flowers you find in UK supermarkets and florists come from East Africa. There's also the joy of a vase of flowers that you've grown from seed! Though, I have to be honest, I don't take them from the borders, I have a cut flower patch up at the veg garden.... I like the borders to be full of colour.

Resilient living for us, simply means having options.

Looking Back to Move Forwards

Perhaps that's one of the reasons we're so drawn to antiques and vintage furniture too.

Many of the pieces we sell were made in much the same spirit as this cottage. They were designed to last for generations, to be repaired rather than replaced, and to become part of a family's story rather than simply following the latest trend.

Solid timber, traditional craftsmanship and natural materials have already proved themselves over decades—often centuries. They remind us that buying well, caring for what we own and choosing quality over convenience isn't old-fashioned at all. In many ways, it's exactly the mindset we need as we think about living more sustainably.

Old furniture isn't simply beautiful. It's resilient too.

Finding Comfort in Simplicity

As I write this, bowls of freshly picked blackcurrants are waiting in the kitchen, the dogs are stretched out on the cool stone floor, and this evening's watering cans are lined up by the back door.

Outside, the heat lingers.

Inside, the cottage carries on much as it always has.

It's unlikely that we can stop the climate changing, but we can choose how we respond to it. We can build homes that are more adaptable, buy things that are made to last, grow a little of our own food, waste a little less and learn from the generations who faced challenges with ingenuity rather than excess.

Perhaps resilient living isn't about having all the answers.

Perhaps it's simply about creating a life that can bend without breaking, finding beauty in things that endure, and remembering that sometimes the old ways still have something important to teach us.