It is a building that historians can describe in reasonable detail but cannot point to on a map, which gives it a peculiar quality: more real than a ruin, yet less findable than one.

The house first appears in the record around 1220, when the historian Clarke identifies it as belonging to a man named Gilbert de Livet, who owned a structure with two stone cellars and a building above. By 1231 it had grown, at least in description, into something considerably grander: a great stone hall with a loft, a cellar, a portico, and a stone-built kitchen. In a period when most urban domestic buildings in Ireland were timber-framed and relatively modest, a multi-roomed stone house of this kind was a mark of real wealth and social standing. Around 1279 the property was granted to St John the Baptist's Hospital, a medieval institution that held considerable landholdings in the Dublin area. A further reference from around 1355 describes it simply as a great stone house, suggesting it retained its character and perhaps its fabric well into the fourteenth century.

Because the site has not been precisely located, there is no specific address to visit and no visible remains to seek out. What remains is the documentary trace itself, accessible through Clarke's 2002 study for those who want to follow the paper trail. The area of Dublin south city where this house presumably stood has been built over and rebuilt many times since the medieval period, and it is entirely possible that archaeological investigation of any future development in the vicinity could yet turn up physical evidence. For now, the house occupies that particular category of Irish medieval archaeology: documented, described in some detail, and stubbornly invisible on the ground.