Standing roughly four metres wide and seven metres deep, with two ground-floor openings, one of them a doorway converted into a window at some point in its life, the building carries within it what are believed to be the remains of the medieval East Gate, the fortified entrance that once crossed this very street.

Fethard is one of the best-preserved walled towns in Ireland, and its circuit of medieval defences is unusually intact. Town gates were the controlled pinch-points of the walled town, where movement could be monitored and taxed, and where the boundary between the protected interior and the world outside was made physically real. The East Gate stood at this location on Burke Street, and though the gate itself is long gone as a functioning structure, the fabric may have survived by being absorbed rather than demolished. The western wall of the current building is thought to incorporate the town wall itself, and inside, a stone stair just 0.79 metres wide rises up the western wall from ground to first-floor level, a detail noted by O'Keeffe in 1995. That kind of narrow internal stair is characteristic of defensive or gatehouse construction, built for practicality and control rather than comfort. The building sits immediately outside the line of the town wall, which fits the typical positioning of a gate structure straddling the boundary.