The Georgian block that once stood here was demolished around 1970, after the Land Commission divided the lands in the 1960s and the building fell into disrepair. What remains are the ruinous outbuildings and stables arranged around a central courtyard, built around 1790, along with the walls of a former walled garden and, on the east gable of the south range, a cut stone plaque that is probably the coat of arms of the Nugent family. A visitor in 1826 described the house itself as a square building without wings, with a gateway of notably fine architecture leading to offices that appeared never to have been finished, which is a quietly melancholy observation that turned out to anticipate the building's eventual fate.

The Nugent connection at this site reaches back well before the Georgian house. In 1613, an inquisition into the estate of the recently deceased Richard Nugent of Donore recorded that he held one castle and 240 acres in the townland of Donowre, within the manor of Multyfarnham. His son Andrew inherited and, by the time of the 1659 Down Survey, a terrier accompanying the map described the property in unusually warm terms: 'There is likewise Donowre upon the side of the Lough Derevarrah a very Handsome English like House with an orchard adjoining to it well planted with good Fruit Trees.' The Down Survey was a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that recorded land ownership across Ireland, and its accompanying terriers occasionally preserved descriptive passages like this one, making them rare windows onto how specific properties looked and were regarded. The map depicts a two-storey single-pile house aligned east to west, with chimney stacks on both gables and a front door centred on the south wall. Andrew Nugent, identified in the survey as an 'Irish papist' owning 423 acres of profitable land, had received a special livery of his estate in 1629. In 1641, he was appointed a captain in the Irish army and commanded a hundred men at Kilsoghlin against English forces, for which he was later indicted. The orchard shown to the east of his house on the Down Survey map corresponds closely to where the walled garden of the later Donore House was located, which is one of the few threads of continuity across the centuries of building and rebuilding on this site. Whether Andrew Nugent's early seventeenth-century house was cleared to make way for the Georgian block, or simply stood somewhere nearby in the surrounding fields, has never been conclusively established.