We report on an experimental study of turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection with asymmetric top and bottom plates. The plates are covered with pyramid-shaped roughness elements whose aspect ratios are $\lambda =1$ or $\lambda =4$ . In the low-Rayleigh-number regime ( $Ra<1.9\times 10^9$ ), the heat transport efficiencies in the asymmetric cells, characterized by the Nusselt number, are smaller than those measured in a symmetric $\lambda = 1$ cell and are greater than those for a symmetric $\lambda = 4$ cell, whereas in the high-Rayleigh-number regime ( $Ra>1.9\times 10^9$ ), the Nusselt numbers of the asymmetric cells are, in turn, greater than those for the symmetric cell with $\lambda = 1$ and smaller than those for the symmetric cell with $\lambda = 4$ . In addition, the heat transports of individual plates are studied based on the temperature drops across both halves of the cell. In the low- $Ra$ regime, the $\lambda =1$ plate shows higher heat transfer than the $\lambda =4$ plate, while for the high- $Ra$ regime, the $\lambda =4$ plate shows a higher heat transport ability. In both regimes, the individual Nusselt number of the plate with lower heat transfer is insensitive to the topology of the other plate. Besides, it is found that the symmetry of the centre temperature distribution is robust to the symmetry breaking of boundary topographies. For the $Ra$ range explored, a weak temperature inversion is observed in the bulk of asymmetric rough cells. Finally, we remark that the temperature fluctuation at the cell centre and the Reynolds number associated with the large-scale circulation show universal power laws in terms of the flux Rayleigh number as $\sigma _{T_{c}}\sim Ra_F^{0.68}$ and $Re_{LSC}\sim Ra_F^{0.36}$ , respectively.