But the details repay a closer look. The east wall is built of timber and brick and visibly bows outward towards the top, while the north gable and west wall are of roughly coursed sandstone rubble, the two materials sitting side by side as though the building was resolved in stages rather than conceived whole. At the north-east angle, the lower courses are rounded off, a small but telling sign of age and wear. Deep window embrasures with sloping sills survive internally, and an external chimney on the west wall, 2.2 metres wide and projecting nearly two metres above ground level, is carried on a corbelled masonry course in a way that was common in late medieval and early post-medieval building practice across Munster.

The structure dates to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and it sits within a part of Tipperary town that was once lined with similar buildings. A document drawn up in 1666 during a post-Cromwellian land settlement recorded the holdings along West Gate Lane and Street, listing over a dozen slated and thatched houses, a number of them described as waste and classified as tenements, meaning they had fallen into ruin or were legally substandard. The word tenement in this context carried a specific legal weight rather than a purely social one, referring to the terms under which property was held. That inventory, cited by Burke in 1907, gives a rare ground-level view of what a modest Irish urban street looked like in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars and the upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland. Six metres to the north-east, a further building retains a window from the same late sixteenth or early seventeenth century period, suggesting the survival of more than one fragment of what was once a denser streetscape.