The structure, bow-fronted and measuring just over twelve metres in length, was built against the north wall of a walled garden, and the external furnaces that once warmed its interior have never been removed. It is the kind of detail that tends to vanish when estates change hands or burn down, which makes its survival here quietly remarkable.

The estate began as the project of Philip Ronayne, a mathematician, who built the original house in the early eighteenth century as a replacement for an older structure known as Old Court. Writing in 1750, the antiquarian Charles Smith described it as "a good house and handsome improvements", when it was still called Ronayne's Grove. The name changed to Marino later in the century, and the house itself did not survive intact; it was burnt around 1860 and replaced with a two-storey building featuring three-sided bows, the curved projections that give certain Georgian and post-Georgian facades their slightly softened outline. Elsewhere on the property, in the yard of Marino Farm to the east of the main Cobh road, a stone milking parlour with a Dutch gable at its eastern end has survived with the appearance of a late seventeenth-century building, predating Ronayne's house altogether and hinting at the longer agricultural life of the land.

The house and orangery now sit within what was developed as an industrial complex, and both have been restored. The milking parlour with its Dutch gable, a stepped or curved parapet style associated with vernacular farm buildings of the period, remains in the farmyard nearby. The site rewards a closer look not for any single grand feature but for the layering: a mathematician's improving ambitions, a Victorian rebuilding after fire, and heating infrastructure for exotic plants, all folded into a working industrial landscape on the edge of Cork Harbour.