When an addition was built around 1830, the original west-facing front of the earlier structure effectively became a rear elevation, and the whole composition was reoriented northward. The older block, dating from around 1760, did not disappear so much as step aside, its pedimented yard-facing rear left untouched while the newer work took over the job of greeting the world.

The Long family is the shadowy presence behind Grove's earlier history. A headstone recorded in Fethard graveyard, dated 1713, was noted by Mullally in the 1860s as likely belonging to that family, who were believed to have lived at Grove before the present house existed. By around 1760, the five-bay, two-storey house over basement had been built, with its six-over-six timber sash windows, the multiple panes of each sash being the standard Georgian arrangement for admitting light without sacrificing structural integrity in the glass technology of the time. The c. 1830 addition brought a three-bay, two-storey block in a slightly different register: dressed limestone string-courses and plinth courses in place of the older render platbands, and simpler one-over-one sash windows rather than the more finely subdivided earlier glazing. The two phases sit together in a symmetrical composition, the newer block flanked by the wings of the older house, though the details quietly give away the gap of some seventy years between them. A bowed corner on the earlier block is one of the more distinctive survivals, a small gesture of Georgian elegance that the later work did not try to replicate.