Compared with Australia, people tend to live in energy-efficient housing in the UK, and their carbon emission is lower although they use a higher amount of energy. This means that they consume less fossil fuel and pay more attention to passive bioclimatic principles. The concept of an Empathic City requires a human-oriented approach rather than one that is machine-centric. Although it is indicated that energy efficiency is a key concept in climate change mitigation, by means of fossil fuel dependence reduction, recently the concept of sufficiency, which depends on the proper energy performance of the whole aspects of a system, has been stressed as an important factor in overall long-term energy consumption reduction. Housing sustainability and the reduction of overall energy consumption are related significantly to the function of the envelope in the area of passive climatic principles and thermal performance. The housing envelope also has significant impacts on occupants’ perceptions and plays a significant role in their housing selection. In the UK and Australia, occupants are eager to select a house, which is able to respond to bioclimatic principles in association with other aspects impacting their perceptions. Therefore, the envelope should be able to transfer messages about energy efficiency in congruity with occupants’ perceptions. It is therefore necessary to look at occupants’ perceptions of envelope energy efficiency and the interplay between the different aspects, e.g. demographic and socio-economic characteristics, building characteristics, and intra-urban environmental dimension in impacting housing energy consumption. To answer these questions, the main gap is to transfer abstract data related to human perceptions into concrete data through the concept of environmental image. Drawing on the idea that the contents of photos are able to express human perceptions, this study has developed a practical methodology to quantify perceptions of housing energy efficiency. A comparison between the UK and Australian occupants would provide a better picture of the interplay between the different aspects of Housing EE and would address similarities and differences in peoples’ EE perceptions and the determinants of their perceptions in two different contexts with different EE measures and experiences. This paper reviews the conceptual and methodological platform along with the future development of this research. Such investigations will assist housing authorities in enhancing the occupants’ positive perceptions via enhancing the congruity of energy-related attributes with their perceptions.