International audience Although the building sector is recognized as having major potential for energy conservation and carbon dioxide emission mitigation, conventional bottom-up and top-down models are limited in their ability to capture the complex economic and technological dynamics of the sector. This paper introduces a hybrid framework developed to assess future household energy demand in France. Res-IRF, a bottom-up module of energy consumption for space heating, has several distinctive features: (i) a clear separation between energy efficiency, i.e. investment in energy efficient technologies, and sufficiency. i.e. changes in the utilization of energy consuming durables which allows the rebound effect to be assessed; (ii) the inclusion of barriers to energy efficiency in the form of intangible costs, consumer heterogeneity parameters and the learning-by-doing process; (iii) an endogenous determination of retrofitting which represents trade-offs between retrofit quantity and quality. Subsequently, Res-IRF is linked to the IMACLIM-R computable general equilibrium model. This exercise shows that, compared to a 37% reduction in final energy demand achievable in business as usual in existing dwellings in 2050, an additional reduction of 21% could be achieved if relevant barriers to efficiency and sufficiency were overcome. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.