The house itself, a two-storey early nineteenth-century structure positioned to look south over the River Blackwater, was burnt that year, one of dozens of Irish country houses destroyed during the Civil War period. What survives is a substantial and architecturally coherent wreck: seven bays on the entrance front, a semicircular porch with round-headed window openings, tripartite windows on the first floor, brick-dressed opes with plaster surrounds throughout. The southern, river-facing elevation runs to four bays with a pedimented door opening, then stretches westward through a nine-bay wing decorated with plaster Doric pilasters, the flat-topped columns of the classical order, set at regular intervals along the facade. The rear elevation has partially collapsed, and an enclosed courtyard lies behind.

The house was designed by James Pain, the Cork-based architect who, along with his brother George Richard Pain, shaped a great deal of the region's early nineteenth-century building. Pain's hand is evident in the careful articulation of the facades and the quality of the decorative detailing, even in its current state. The wider estate complex tells its own story: a set of farm buildings around a courtyard to the northwest carries a datestone of 1838, and a two-storey gardener's house is attached nearby. A steward's house to the west was still occupied at the time the site was last formally recorded. South of the main house there is a small square tea house of notably ornate character, with a brick arcaded retaining wall for an adjacent tennis court, and roughly a hundred metres further south, an ice house, the kind of subterranean cold-storage vault common on prosperous Georgian and Victorian estates.

The ensemble at Conva is unusually complete for a burnt-out house. The farm buildings, the outbuildings, the service structures, and the small pleasure features like the tea house all remain, giving a clearer picture of how a working estate of this scale was organised than the main house alone could offer.