What makes the building quietly peculiar is not simply its abandonment, but the way it carries traces of two separate periods of habitation in a single set of walls. Several windows on its eastern elevation have 18th-century moulded sills that do not belong to the house itself; they were almost certainly salvaged from an earlier structure that once stood roughly forty metres to the south-west, then incorporated into the new building when that predecessor was superseded.

The house was built in 1814 by the Stawell family, who evidently decided their older seat was no longer adequate and commissioned a replacement in the prevailing Regency manner. The south-facing entrance front presents three bays, with a round-headed door opening, the arch now concealed behind a porch. The ground-floor windows are tripartite, meaning each opening is divided into three lights, and they sit on curved limestone sills with plaster surrounds. Around the back, a round-headed staircase window with a curved frame survives as a more delicate detail. The roofline follows a hipped form with a central valley running between two off-centre chimneys, a configuration that gives the building a slightly asymmetrical silhouette when seen from a distance. The recycled sills from the earlier house are the most telling feature: rather than simply demolishing what came before, whoever supervised the build in 1814 thought it worth preserving at least the cut stonework, carrying something of the older place forward into the new one.