Blocked-up openings suggest where windows and doorways once sat, but the three-storey, six-bay house that once stood here was demolished in 1941, leaving only this outline as evidence of its existence. For a building of such cultural significance, the gap between what it once was and what survives today is quietly startling.

The house was built around 1770 by Robert Gregory, and in its original form it carried some architectural ambition: a Venetian window on the first floor above the entrance front, and a Diocletian window, a semicircular opening divided by two mullions, on the second. Later alterations softened or obscured some of these details, including a plain enclosed porch added over the original doorway, and early Victorian curved bows attached to the garden front. But it is the house's social life in the early twentieth century that gives Coole its particular weight. Lady Augusta Gregory, poet, playwright, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, made this her home, and the demesne became a gathering point for the writers who shaped the Irish Literary Revival. George Bernard Shaw came here, as did J.M. Synge and Seán O'Casey. W.B. Yeats was a frequent presence, and it was the lake and woodland of the Coole demesne that he wrote about in "The Wild Swans at Coole", one of his most recognised poems.

The site is now within Coole-Garryland Nature Reserve, managed as a public space, and the plinth of the house is accessible to visitors. The surrounding demesne, with its turlough, woodland, and the lake that Yeats described, gives the place a context that the bare stonework alone cannot convey. A famous copper beech tree in the walled garden bears the carved initials of many of the writers who visited, a detail that makes the literary history feel unusually physical and present.