Two design innovations are reported that can help improve the thermal performance of a solar cavity receiver. These innovations utilise the natural variation of wall temperature inside the cavity and active management of airflow in the vicinity of the receiver. The results of computational fluid dynamics modelling and laboratory-scale experiments suggest that the convective loss from a receiver can be reduced substantially by either mechanism. A further benefit is that both radiative and overall thermal losses from the cavity may be reduced. Further work to assess the performance of such receiver designs under operational conditions is discussed.