The building at Coolgarriv is two storeys over a basement, a form that speaks to a particular kind of nineteenth-century rural confidence, the household elevated above the damp ground, the servants' work tucked below.

Built in 1838, according to Bary's 1994 account of the area, the house follows a restrained but considered design. The north-facing front presents three bays, and at its centre sits a doorway with a semicircular fanlight, that characteristic Georgian detail in which a half-circle of radiating glazing bars sits above the door to let light into the entrance hall. Here, the fanlight is flanked by sidelights and sheltered behind a gabled porch, which has the effect of partly concealing the very feature it was presumably meant to frame. At the rear, a two-storey central projection adds depth to the plan, and the whole is finished with a hipped roof, one that slopes on all four sides rather than ending in gable walls, and two chimneys placed off-centre in a way that gives the roofline a slightly asymmetrical character. It is a house that repays attention to its details, even in its current abandoned state.