Elaborate water features were a mark of serious ambition in early eighteenth-century garden design, and this one has long since been stopped up and forgotten, leaving only the faintest structural trace in the stonework. The western side of the same garden may conceal something older still: a possible site of St. Brandon's church, its presence unconfirmed but recorded as a distinct possibility.

The house itself was probably built between 1716 and 1724 by Elias Voster, a Dutchman who had settled in Cork. His origins give the building a quietly unusual provenance, coming at a moment when Protestant merchant communities, many of them with continental European ties, were shaping the commercial and domestic life of the city. The architecture bears out its early date with some formality: the north-facing entrance front presents five bays, with a central breakfront carrying a wide sash window of twenty-five lights above a fanlighted door flanked by coupled engaged Doric columns, that is, columns set in pairs against the wall rather than freestanding. The south front looks outward over a view, and has a central two-bay bow. Inside, an eighteenth-century staircase and plasterwork survive, alongside Victorian dormers added during alterations carried out in the 1860s, when the hipped roof was also modified. A round-headed window on the east elevation lights the stairway, one of those quiet functional details that often gets more attention than the grander gestures once you are actually standing in front of a building.