The house was designed as a passive solar design, which allows winter sun into the house, but blocks out as much summer sun as possible. As we are in quite a deep valley we do not have to worry so much about morning and evening sun on the east and west of the building which allows us to have much larger windows than normal on the sides of the house.
However the windows and the wide overhanging eves on the north side have been designed so that the angle between the tip of the roof and the bottom of the window is about the same as the angle of the sun at the equinoxes.
In addition the house is made of solid mud brick walls 250mm thick. While these are not very good insulators, they are very heavy, and therefore they take a long time to warm up or cool down. There are also a lot of mud brick walls inside the house, which also helps to keep the building at an even temperature. Just the bricks that are totally inside the house weigh more than 20 tons.
The result of this is that it takes several days of 40 degree weather to get the internal temperature over 26 degrees, and a cool breezy night is enough to cool the house down again, as long as the windows in the top of the living room are opened to flush the warm air out.
During winter the fire warms the large curved brick wall behind it , and this keeps the house temperature surprisingly consistent, despite the large windows with no curtains. The bedrooms do get rather cooler than the living room but we quite like it that way.
