Abstract Building envelope design features and orientation significantly influence energy demand and thermal comfort in residential buildings, particularly in hot climates. While previous studies have often optimized building orientation together with envelope features, real-world urban conditions frequently impose fixed orientations that limit such flexibility. This study introduces a data-driven, multi-objective framework that treats orientation as a fixed constraint and systematically adapts envelope thermal and geometrical features, accordingly, resulting in the proposed Adaptive Envelope Feature–Orientation (AEF-O) approach. The framework integrates empirically validated energy simulation with multi-objective optimization to generate a comprehensive dataset of 11,890 design scenarios for a representative residential building archetype. Regression-based global sensitivity analysis, supported by multiple linear regression, is employed to quantify the relative influence of envelope design features on cooling load and thermal discomfort. The results indicate that the thermal properties of walls and roofs exhibit substantially higher standardized sensitivity indices than geometrical features, demonstrating their dominant relative influence within the explored building type. Orientation-specific regression models, validated using 10-fold cross-validation, achieve coefficients of determination (R²) of up to 0.97, capturing the relationship between sensitive envelope features and cooling demand. Based on these models, orientation-tailored envelope benchmarks are derived, achieving reductions of 30–40% in cooling loads and up to a 28% increase in comfort hours compared to the baseline configuration. The findings highlight the importance of adaptive façade design strategies that respond to orientation constraints, offering a practical and flexible pathway toward energy-efficient residential buildings in hot climates.
Waly et al. (Sat,) studied this question.