The innovative Brisbane home that challenges the traditional ‘Queenslander’ design
Architect Peter Besley wants to make something clear. He’s not against “typical” Brisbane home design. He particularly likes classic Queenslanders.
“I have a lot of respect for old houses. I think the language that has developed here is really beautiful.”
“Historically we have never considered doing this,” he says.
What Besley did was design a house with no roof overhangs for shade, floor-to-ceiling windows or a veranda: “All the things we’ve been taught as architects in Queensland that you have to have.”
Instead, a self-shading brickwork is used, topped by a ziggurat-shaped skylight.
The street façade of the house is deliberately blank and ordinary, even brutally designed, and is surrounded by stainless steel mesh for security purposes instead of railings.
He has a pool in his backyard, but it’s small in diameter, three meters deep and silo-shaped (“You can drop like a stone to the bottom in the middle of a really hot Brisbane day and it’s so refreshing down there”).
The home’s approach to cooling is not to try to catch the breeze, but rather to trap cool air during the night and protect against the heat of the day.
And if it reminds you of African or Middle Eastern architecture, there’s a good reason for that.
The “Birdwood” house, located on a street at the foot of Mount Coot-tha, won first prize for the house at the Queensland Architecture Awards 2026.
The awards, presented annually by the Australian Institute of Architects, recognize architectural innovations from across the state.
“In the winning residences we saw examples of homes that reframe our preconceptions about the traditional ‘Queenslander’ home and embark on ambitious new typologies,” said jury chairman Professor Michael Keniger.
Brisbane-born Besley’s design was based on years of residential training in Iraq, where he worked on projects for the United Nations.
“Baghdad is very hot, hotter than here,” he says.
“You don’t do the intuitive thing you do in Queensland and open all the windows during the day. You actually keep it half closed because you want to keep that cool air in.”
“Floors, walls and ceilings need to be heavy because they have a kind of thermal inertia.”
The owners appointed Besley pre-COVID and he planned the house “backwards” after receiving pallets of bricks from the closure of the Claypave brickworks in Ipswich.
It also used precast concrete slabs, which use about 40 percent less concrete than traditional casting.
The building is groundbreaking not only in its design and reuse of materials, but also in its flexible, consultative construction process.
When COVID hit, it led to steep price increases, so Besley stepped in to negotiate between the homeowner and builder by redesigning the home to avoid dealing with expensive outside contractors.
“The standard situation is to put people on a lump sum contract, then people go out of work, then the design suffers, then everyone suffers.
“I think I made 600 revisions to the drawings for this house because I kept changing things to make it accessible to existing people.”
For example, the building has a “hanging” library designed to house 3,000 history books. It is designed so that the carpenter can easily make it from on-site joinery.
The result is a home that Besley says is about one-third the size of most people’s estimates.
Besley says his time in the Middle East changed his thinking about how homes could be populated, with sleeping and eating interchanging in different parts of the home.
In his opinion, we focus too much on things like kitchen cabinets and don’t think enough about homes as big spaces to live in.
“People’s obsession with their appliances and their kitchens, it’s not so much wrong, it’s secondary, it’s tertiary, it’s not the real deal.”
Other local buildings to win Queensland Architecture Awards include St Joseph’s College Gregory Terrace, commercial skyscraper 205 North Quay, Sunshine Coast University Library and St Peters Lutheran College Chapel, Indooroopilly.
Brisbane Metro wins urban design award.
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Nick Dent is a Culture Reporter for the Brisbane Times covering arts, entertainment and things to do in the city.Connect via email.
