The central block, which would have formed the principal face of the building, was demolished in the late nineteenth century, leaving the structure incomplete and its history somewhat awkward to read. The Bryan family had been associated with the property since 1650, a span of occupation that can tempt one into imagining a much older building at the core, though the physical evidence does not support that idea.

The house that actually survives, or partially survives, was built in the early nineteenth century by Major George Bryan, to a design by William Robertson of Kilkenny. Robertson was a local architect, and the commission reflects the kind of gentry building activity that was common in Leinster during that period, when landowners were upgrading or replacing earlier domestic arrangements with something more formally composed. The demolition of the central block later in the same century introduced a strange asymmetry into the history of the place: a relatively new house, stripped of its core within a few generations of being built, while the family connection it represented stretched back nearly two hundred and fifty years.