They were Dutch Billies, a term used in Ireland for a style of terraced brick house whose most immediately recognisable feature was a stepped or curved gable facing the street, the roof-ridge running not parallel to the footpath but at right angles to it, so that the narrow gable end presented itself to the world rather than the long flank of the building. The effect was distinctly un-Georgian, closer in spirit to Amsterdam or Delft than to the wide sash-windowed terraces that would come to define so much of the city.

The architectural historian Maurice Craig recorded the existence of two late seventeenth-century examples on this site, drawing attention to the features that made them typical of the form. The lower walls were built from calp limestone, a dark, fine-grained stone quarried locally around Dublin and used widely in the city's older fabric, with upper courses of redbrick laid above. Inside, the rooms were compact, two or three to a floor, with corner fireplaces rather than the centred chimney-breast more familiar from later periods. Corner fireplaces were an economy measure: two adjoining houses could share a single large chimney-stack between them, reducing both material costs and the footprint lost to the flue. The floors were of cobbles or redbrick, the roof-pitch steeper than would become fashionable later in the eighteenth century, and the rear returns contained a small closet on each level. The shared party walls and mirrored chimney arrangements suggest the pair were built to a co-ordinated plan rather than assembled piecemeal. They were demolished around 1955.

There is nothing to see at the site today. No above-ground fabric survives, and the record amounts to what Craig preserved in print and what was compiled by Geraldine Stout for the Sites and Monuments Record in 2012. For anyone interested in what Dublin looked like before the Georgian rebuild swept through the city, the Dutch Billy as a type is worth knowing about; a small number of examples survive elsewhere in the city, much altered, and they require some searching out. This particular pair exists now only as a footnote in the documentary record, a small data point in the larger, mostly unwritten story of how the city remade itself across the twentieth century.