The country house at Gortageen in north County Cork began life as a two-storey structure sometime in the 1730s, then at some later point gained an entire extra storey, transforming itself into the three-storey, gable-ended building that stands today. The result is a T-shaped plan, a form that often signals a house assembled in stages rather than conceived whole, with a slightly lower three-storey gabled addition to the rear and a two-storey block attached to the north.

The southern entrance front presents five bays to the visitor, with a central porch marking the main entrance, rectangular window openings, and a cornice running beneath the eaves. Chimneys sit atop the gables. Some of the sash windows, the sliding timber-framed type that became ubiquitous in Irish domestic architecture through the eighteenth century, retain shallow reveals, where the wall thickness around the frame is relatively slight, a detail that can hint at original proportions before later modifications. The modern window frames elsewhere in the facade sit a little uneasily beside these older elements, giving the building something of a layered quality, each generation's alterations legible in the fabric if you look carefully enough. Local information attributes the original construction to the 1730s, and the subsequent raising of the roof line suggests the house was considered worth investing in as the century wore on, even if no documentary record of who ordered that work, or when precisely, has come to light.