Up close, though, they would have been immediately distinctive: cagework construction, a timber-framed building technique in which the structural skeleton of wooden posts, beams, and diagonal braces is left exposed on the exterior, with the panels between filled with wattle, plaster, or brick. It is a method more readily associated with medieval English market towns than with the Irish urban streetscape, which makes its recorded presence in Dublin's Liberties all the more quietly interesting.

The evidence for these buildings comes from Walsh, writing in 1973, who notes that five such cagework houses were erected at this corner, though no precise date of construction is given. Cagework, sometimes called half-timbering, was not unknown in Dublin during the medieval and early modern periods, when the city's building culture drew on both English and continental influences. The Liberties, the area just outside the old city walls where Thomas Street runs, was for centuries a busy commercial district, home to weavers, tanners, and traders, and its streetscape would have included a variety of vernacular building types that have since almost entirely vanished. These five houses are a case in point: they were demolished at some point after Walsh recorded them, leaving no physical trace.

There is nothing to see at the site now. Thomas Street remains a functioning urban street in the south inner city, and the corner with Mass Lane, a small thoroughfare that no longer carries much significance in the daily geography of the area, gives no indication of what once stood there. For anyone interested in the lost domestic architecture of early Dublin, Walsh's 1973 reference is the thread worth following, a brief note that preserves the memory of a building type that was already rare when it was recorded and is now entirely absent from the city's fabric.