The house at Cloonmoylan, built around 1860, quietly breaks that convention. Its main entrance is positioned not in the south-facing garden elevation, as one would expect, but in the gable, on the east side of the building. It is a small but telling anomaly, the kind of decision that suggests either a very particular relationship with the surrounding land or an architect willing to subordinate convention to practicality.

The building is what architects call a triple-pile house, meaning it has three parallel ranges running from front to back rather than the single depth of a simpler dwelling. This gives it a distinctive cross-section: the central pile projects slightly at both the east and west ends, creating a subtly articulated outline that reads differently depending on where you stand. The south elevation is finished in cement render with broken string courses, horizontal decorative bands that break up the wall surface and add a degree of formal interest to what might otherwise be a plain face. To the rear, the finish is roughcast rather than smooth render, a common practical distinction between the face presented to visitors and the working side of a house. The pointed openings in the upper gables of the north and south piles introduce a mild Gothic note, modest but deliberate. Around the house, the ensemble extends to a yard to the north with several two-storey outbuildings, a walled garden bounded by rubble limestone to the west, and a gate entrance flanked by rendered piers. The outbuildings themselves are substantial, one with an elliptical-arch vehicular entrance on the west side of the yard, and together the whole group reads as a working estate complex of middling ambition, coherent and intact enough to give a clear sense of how such a household would have been organised in the latter half of the nineteenth century.