The building was once two storeys, roofed with a hipped slate covering across five bays, and its entrance featured a round-headed door opening reached by an arched stairway, details that speak to a proprietor with some interest in presenting a considered face to the world. A curtain wall, a low enclosing boundary structure common to houses of this class, links the main ruin to the pedimented gable of associated farm buildings, and decorative niches are worked into both the wall and the gables, small gestures of architectural refinement in what would have been a working estate.

The house was built by G. Allman, identified in local research by Ó Donnchadha as the owner of the Overton Cotton Mills, which the house overlooked to the north-east. The pairing of a gentleman's residence with a directly visible industrial operation was not unusual in this period; the mill was the source of the money, and the house was positioned, literally and socially, above it. Cotton milling in early nineteenth-century Cork was a relatively short-lived industry, squeezed between the mechanisation of English competitors and the particular difficulties of the Irish economy after the Act of Union, which makes the survival of even these fragmentary remains a moderately rare trace of that particular commercial moment.