The brief
The owners of a heritage-listed 1900s terrace in Paddington wanted their home to be genuinely warm for the first time in a century of winters — but the heritage listing and the interiors ruled out the usual options. Ducted heating meant bulkheads and demolition. Wall radiators meant drilling into original lath-and-plaster and covering period joinery. They'd almost given up on whole-home heating when they came to AHHAC.
The heritage challenge
Heritage homes are the hardest hydronic problem — and our favourite. You can't scar the fabric, you can't run visible plant, and you often can't lift original floors. The classic answer is European panel radiators, but in this terrace even those would have interrupted the period rooms the owners had spent years restoring. We needed heat that disappeared into the architecture.
The design
The answer was ThermaSkirt — an aluminium hydronic element that replaces the ordinary skirting board around the perimeter of every room. At just 22 mm deep and 150 mm tall it looks like a slightly deeper skirting and nothing more; there are no radiators, no floor works and no visible plant anywhere in the house. We ran a full heat-loss calculation room by room, sized the skirting run to each room's demand, and drove the whole system with a compact air-source heat pump tucked discreetly in the rear courtyard — keeping the home all-electric and solar-ready.
Because ThermaSkirt distributes gentle heat right around the room at low level, it warms evenly from the edges in — ideal for the high ceilings and draughty proportions of a Federation terrace. It runs at a low flow temperature too, which is exactly where the heat pump is most efficient.
The result
For the first time the terrace is warm in every room, corner to corner, with nothing on show and not a single original feature disturbed. Heating running cost came in around $720 for the season before the owners' rooftop solar, which pushes daytime running close to zero. The heritage consultant signed off without hesitation — because, visually, nothing had changed.
It's the project we point to whenever someone says a period home "can't have heating." It can — you just have to hide it in the skirting. For similar homes see our Sydney hydronic heating page, our heritage-focused Mosman work, or the full ThermaSkirt system page.