Climate change could substantially impact on the performance of buildings in providing thermal comfort to occupants. The recently launched UK climate projections (UKCP09) suggest that all areas of the UK will become warmer in the future with the possibility of more frequent and severe extreme events, such as heat waves. This study, as part of the low carbon futures (LCF) project, explores the consequent risk of overheating and the vulnerability of a building to extreme events. A simple statistical model proposed by the LCF project elsewhere has been employed to emulate the outputs of the dynamic building simulator (ESP-r), which if directly used with the numerous replicated climates available from a probabilistic climate database could be practically challenging. For complex probabilistic climate datasets, we demonstrate the efficiency of the statistical tool in performing a systematic analysis of various aspects of heat waves including: frequency of extreme heat events in changing climate; its impact on overheating issues and effects of specific adaptation techniques applied to offset predicted overheating. We consider a domestic building as a virtual case study. Results are presented relative to a baseline climate (1961–1990) for three future timelines (2030s, 2050s and 2080s) and three emission scenarios (Low, Medium and High).