Radiating Cool

If you grew up and studied architecture in Queensland, like architect Peter Besley did, you’d likely have been taught that the way to create houses for the Sunshine State’s hot, subtropical climate is to use green Australian hardwood and have big, sloping tin roofs and encircling verandahs with generous overhangs. You’d have been told that you must cleverly position the direction of the house and its openings to encourage breezes to pass through. This is “a lightweight, highly shaded, incredibly adaptable, incredibly replicable, vernacular housing typology,” Besley explains, adding that it is also cheap and makes use of readily available materials. In other words, it is a tried and tested typology that works.

When Besley found himself working in the Middle East from the early 2000s onwards, however, he quickly realised that there are other ways to design for warm climates. “I was in some of the hottest parts of the world,” Besley explains, “and the architecture was completely the opposite of what I’d learnt.” He saw brick-heavy buildings with flat roofs, no overhanging elements and generous inner courtyards.

Working mostly in Baghdad, he came to learn about radiant cooling – a technique that essentially works by a massive, heavy object absorbing cool temperatures overnight and then storing and radiating them as the day heats up. The opposite can happen too: think of a road that is baking hot and that radiates heat even though the sun is no longer directly on it. Given that Queensland has a roughly 10 degree difference in temperature between night and day, Besley figured the radiant cooling technique would work well there too.

Birdwood House, completed in 2025, is evidence that Besley’s theory was correct. The “immensely heavy building”, that is made up of multiple parts, is constructed from bricks and cast concrete. In areas, it uses a non-structural outer layer of beautifully laid brickwork to throw shade onto the walls it surrounds, essentially keeping the main building away from the direct sun and, therefore, cool. The thermal mass of the building stores and radiates this coolness in the hottest parts of the day. Besley has stayed in the house on a number of occasions in the past two years and says the design “actually works better than expected” in terms of cooling. This is despite it being “a completely different type of construction” to what is expected in Brisbane and almost counterintuitive to what we might think of as a sustainable home. “I think that some people think of eco-friendly housing as looking like a little cabin in the woods,” Besley explains, “but I’m not sure that’s the case…”

In addition to reducing energy needed for cooling and heating, Birdwood uses its unconventional (for its site) shape and materiality to reduce its ecological impact. The flat roof of the house, for example, is perfect for multiple solar panels that can be maintained or updated easily.

The bricks, meanwhile, were salvaged from a local brickworks that was in the process of being liquidated. After a serendipitous call from a masonry friend who found out that the company was planning to bury their remaining stock, Besley visited the yard armed with sticky notes. He left these on all palettes he wanted, describing the experience as “like being in a chocolate shop.” Interestingly, for this project, the bricks came before the design process had begun. Thus, the materials informed the approach, rather than the other way around.

The house also uses recycled hardwood timber for ceilings, avoids plastics, paint and unnecessary finishes and has large rainwater tanks. All of these things combine to create a house which plays with the expectations and realities of what sustainable construction can look like. Another area of the house that defies architectural expectations is the suspended library. “The client has this outrageous collection of books,” Besley explains, noting that many of them are, by happy coincidence, about the Middle East. “He has thousands and thousands of books! In fact, he drives everybody mad by buying more and more. It’s a big family joke.”

Besley explains that throughout architectural history libraries have been incredibly introverted spaces – in a loft, a basement or tucked away for quiet concentration. “I wanted to play with this,” he says. So, he put it in the most public part of the house, hanging from the ceiling of the double-height living and dining room. From downstairs, you can’t see into it, and it retains the sense of privacy necessary for concentrated reading. Yet those inside the cosy half-walled space, accessed via a small bridge on the upper floors, have views far across the suburban landscape. A ziggurat-like structure above the library filters in sunlight.

Tucked at the furthest part of the back garden is a pool which is similarly defiant of expectations. It deftly (and safely) navigates Australia’s understandably strict fencing laws. Instead of the usual approach of being fenced in from all sides, the pool is raised high off the ground it sits on, making use of the sloped site, and only needs a gate covering the small entrance. This lack of encompassing barriers creates the “feeling of a monkey sitting in a pool in the mountains surrounded by canopy,” Besley describes. It’s not a description I was expecting – which feels extremely fitting for this house.