Number 11 Exchange Street Upper carries the distinctive roofline of a Dutch Billy house, a form that was once extraordinarily common in the city but has now almost entirely vanished from the streetscape. The term refers to a style of urban townhouse characterised by a stepped or curvilinear gabled façade facing the street, a fashion that arrived in Ireland broadly in the wake of the Williamite period and spread rapidly through Dublin's merchant and artisan quarters during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At one point, whole streets of them lined the quays and lanes of the old city. Today, survivors are rare enough to attract the attention of architectural historians.

The Dutch Billy form takes its informal name from the reign of William of Orange, though the gabled house type itself had deep roots in Dutch and Flemish urban architecture long before it crossed the Irish Sea. In Dublin, the style suited the narrow plots of the medieval street grid, where a tall, gabled frontage maximised the visual presence of a building on a tight site. Number 11 was identified as being of this type by archaeologists Linzi Simpson and Ed O'Donovan in November 1997, who noted that its form could plausibly date it to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Pinning down an exact construction date has not been possible, which places it in a frustrating but not uncommon category of Dublin's older building stock, structures that predate systematic record-keeping and whose origins have to be inferred from physical fabric rather than documents.

Exchange Street Upper runs close to the river Liffey in the area around Dublin's old Merchants' Quarter, within walking distance of the castle and the surviving fabric of the medieval city. The street is not long, and number 11 is best examined from the pavement directly opposite, where the roofline reads most clearly against the sky. The building sits in a part of the city that has seen significant archaeological excavation and redevelopment over the decades, which makes any fabric that has survived from this period all the more worth pausing over. Visitors with an interest in vernacular architecture may find it useful to look at comparable examples, since so few Dublin Dutch Billies remain that each one offers a slightly different lesson in how the type adapted to local conditions and individual budgets.