The T-shaped, single-storey plan, the central gabled porch projection, and the large camber-headed window openings on either side of the entrance, where a camber-headed opening means one with a gently arched top rather than a full semicircle, all point to a purposeful piece of early nineteenth-century institutional design rather than something improvised or adapted from an existing domestic building.

The building dates to around 1830, a period when formal schooling in rural Ireland was undergoing significant change. The National School system would not be established until 1831, meaning this structure sits right at the cusp of that transition, likely predating or coinciding with the earliest wave of state-supported education. Its symmetrical three-bay front elevation and the chimneys set on each gable suggest a building designed with some intention and civic seriousness, modest in scale but not makeshift. That it survives in recognisable form on Shelburne Street, now operating as a restaurant, gives it a quiet biographical strangeness: the proportions and fenestration that once admitted light for reading slates now illuminate a dining room.