Its five-bay front elevation, with a door placed not at the centre but shifted to the right, follows a pattern common in Irish rural building yet rarely paused over. Those projecting jambs framing the doorway are a small but telling detail, the kind of considered finish that distinguishes a house built with some intention from a purely improvised structure.

The building sits to the east of Derryvillane church and graveyard, companions that give it a certain gravity of location. Its hipped roof, where the roof slopes down on all four sides rather than ending in a gable, carries a thatch covering, one of the older roofing traditions in Ireland and increasingly rare in the landscape today. The chimney arrangement is instructive: one sits off-centre to the right, corresponding with the asymmetric door below, while a later brick chimney was added into the western end wall, a visible record of the building being adapted and extended over time. The addition to the rear follows a familiar pattern of rural Irish domestic life, where households grew incrementally, adding rooms outward as need and means allowed rather than building afresh.