The shell of a two-storey house over a basement, completed in 1833, it was built to a confident neo-classical formula, with cut limestone detailing throughout and a five-bay south-east front flanked by single-storey ornate wings. One of those wings carries a pedimented portico, a formal columned entrance porch of the sort that signals serious architectural intent, and this one was singled out by the architectural historian the Knight of Glin, writing in 1988, as 'superb and very correct Doric'. That phrase, 'very correct', is telling: Doric is the oldest and plainest of the Greek orders, and getting it right requires discipline rather than flourish. Someone at Dromdihy was paying close attention.

The house was completed in 1833 by Roger Green Davis, according to Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, published just four years later in 1837. The date places it squarely in the period when the neo-classical style, drawn from ancient Greek and Roman precedent, was at its most self-assured in Irish domestic architecture, particularly among the Cork gentry. The stables to the north-west of the main house have since been converted into residential quarters, meaning that part of the demesne remains in active use even as the principal building has fallen into ruin. It is a common enough fate for the ancillary structures of such houses to outlast the main block in practical terms, the working buildings proving more adaptable than the grand ones.