Tucked into the inner angle of an L-shaped plan, the entrance porch is curved rather than square, an unusual architectural choice that gives the whole front elevation a quietly eccentric quality. Above the vertical half-door, sidelights are set into the porch walls and a wide elliptical fanlight arches overhead, letting light into what might otherwise be a rather compressed corner. One window opening still holds its original double slim sash, the rest having been replaced with modern frames, so the house presents a slightly uneven face to the world, part Georgian survival, part gradual accommodation to later convenience.

The building stands on a rise above the Roughty River in County Kerry and dates in appearance to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Its two storeys sit over a basement on the northern arm, and the gable ends to the south and east carry a subtle ornamental detail: a course of projecting cut stone at the base of each gable that mimics the effect of a broken pediment, a classical motif in which the triangular gable form is interrupted at its apex or base, more commonly seen on grander formal architecture than on a rural Irish country house. Patches of weather-slating survive on the western elevation, a practical finishing technique in which overlapping slates are fixed vertically to an exposed wall to shed rain. According to the family who own it, the land was granted to Trinity College Dublin in 1597, and the house was subsequently built on the college's behalf, which would make this a quiet material remnant of the Elizabethan plantation system and the reach of Dublin's institutions into the Munster countryside.