The building that became Dr Steevens' Hospital owed its existence to a peculiar piece of forward planning: a doctor who died in 1710 left his money not directly to a charity but in trust to his twin sister, with the instruction that only after her death should the funds be used to establish a hospital. Grizel Steevens, however, decided she had no intention of waiting.

Dr Richard Steevens, President of the College of Physicians, made his bequest with a posthumous foundation in mind, but Grizel took possession of the estate and moved quickly. She purchased ground at the west end of James's Street, well away from the more densely settled city, the open fields offering some buffer from the infection that clustered in older neighbourhoods closer to the river. Work began in 1720 to a design by Thomas Burgh, the architect also responsible for the Old Library at Trinity College. The original funding was not sufficient for the scale Grizel envisaged, and the building progressed through a combination of bequests and her own annual contribution of £450. Two thirds of the structure was complete by July 1733, when the hospital opened; a further subscription among Governors raised nearly £1,400 to finish the remainder. When Pool and Cash described it in 1780, they recorded a spacious square building arranged around a central area with a piazza running around it, capable of receiving three hundred patients. Among those who took an interest in its early years was Esther Johnson, known as Swift's Stella, who left one thousand pounds, the bulk of her fortune, to endow a chaplaincy there. Contemporary accounts, attributed to gentlemen who had travelled widely, judged Steevens' the cleanest hospital of its kind in Europe. Patient meals, for context, ran to eight ounces of boiled mutton and a quart of beer at dinner.

The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records it as a detached nineteen-bay, two-storey building with a dormer attic, four ranges enclosing a central courtyard, and projecting end-bays on the principal elevations, a form that is still largely legible from the street. The building is on Steevens' Lane, off Saint John's Road West in Dublin 8, and is now in use as Health Service Executive offices. Access to the interior is not generally open to the public, but the exterior and the general massing of the courtyard elevation can be appreciated from the approach on foot from Heuston Station, a few minutes' walk to the west.