Cozy means fireplaces, grey skies, and a good coffee shop on a rainy day. We built a data model around exactly that: scraping 2.97 million real home sales to measure fireplace prevalence, NOAA climate data for cloud cover and rain, and coffee shop density by city. Then we let the numbers pick the winner. You probably haven't heard of it.
Most "cozy city" rankings are vibes dressed up as data. This one started differently: with a Python scraper running for 36 hours across 15,245 zip codes, pulling real MLS transaction data from Redfin to measure fireplace prevalence by actual home sales. Not surveys. Not estimates. Sales.
What the raw data showed first was a problem. Texas and Florida dominated the fireplace rankings nationally — not because residents are cold, but because in warm markets, fireplaces are luxury amenities that sellers advertise aggressively. A McAllen, TX home with an 89.7% fireplace listing rate is not cozy. It's marketing. So we applied two NOAA climate filters — 150+ cloudy days per year and a mean January temperature under 50°F — and rebuilt the study from the 98 metros that genuinely earned the right to be here. Then we ran the model. Bellingham, Washington came out on top. Anchorage showed up at #7. The data had opinions.
Weighted: Hearth 35% · Weather 30% · Coffee 20% · Demand 15%. All sub-scores normalized 0–10.
| # | City | Fireplace % | Weather ? | Coffee /100k | Demand | Breakdown | Score |
|---|
Six findings that change how you think about coziness in America.
With 232 cloudy days — more than any other major metro in the Lower 48 — and a 30.3% fireplace rate across 2,799 verified sales, Bellingham scores 8.05 composite. No single metric carries it. Three do.
McAllen, TX leads all 217 metros with an 89.7% fireplace listing rate. In warm markets, fireplaces are luxury amenities sellers advertise aggressively. Without a cold-climate filter, the entire study is meaningless. We applied one.
Seattle scores a perfect 10.0 on search demand with a Google Trends score of 55.4 — highest in the study. It ranks 5th because its dense housing stock caps fireplace prevalence at 18.5% across 45,849 sales.
Alaska has more coffee shops per capita than virtually any other state. Anchorage scores a perfect 10.0 on coffee and logs 239 cloudy days per year — the cloudiest city in the study. The model found it. We didn't place it there.
39.4% of Sioux Falls homes sold last year listed a fireplace — a perfect 10.0 hearth score. It still ranks 12th because South Dakota winters arrive under relatively clear skies: only 165 cloudy days and 96 rain days per year.
Five of the top nine cities are in Washington or Oregon. Seattle, Bellingham, Bremerton, and Olympia all post weather scores above 9.2 out of 10. No other region comes close. Marine air off the Pacific does what cold alone cannot.
This study was designed to answer a specific question: which American cities have the highest concentration of the conditions that make a fireplace feel necessary — not decorative. The model uses four metrics weighted to reflect that premise.
| Metric | Weight | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearth — Fireplace prevalence | 35% | Redfin.com — programmatic scrape of public listing pages, 15,245 zip codes | % of homes sold in last 12 months listing fireplace as a feature. 2,972,767 total transactions. Scrape completed March 2026. |
| Weather — Cloud + rain days | 30% | NOAA NCEI — U.S. Climate Normals 1991–2020 | Average of (annual cloudy days) and (annual rain days), normalized 0–10. Cloudy = ≥80% sky cover during daylight. |
| Coffee — Shops per 100,000 residents | 20% | WalletHub 2025 / Clever Real Estate 2024 | Coffee shops, houses, and cafés per capita. Pittsburgh #1 nationally per WalletHub 2025. Portland #1 per Clever Real Estate 2024. |
| Demand — Google Trends "fireplace" | 15% | Google Trends via pytrends API, March 2026 | Regional interest score for search term "fireplace." Pulled March 20, 2026 across all 15 finalist metros. |
All sub-scores use min-max normalization across the 98-city qualified pool. The lowest city on each metric scores 0.0; the highest scores 10.0. Final composite: (Hearth × 0.35) + (Weather × 0.30) + (Coffee × 0.20) + (Demand × 0.15).
The complete dataset underlying this study is made available for independent verification, academic use, and editorial reference. Journalists and researchers are welcome to reproduce findings with attribution to BestBurnFirewood.com.
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