The central block dates to around 1650, a period when the line between fortified residence and ordinary house was deliberately blurred in this part of Ireland. What you see today is a layered structure: that seventeenth-century core, five bays wide and rising to two and three storeys, was substantially extended around 1860 with the addition of two crenellated towers, one of two bays to the south-west and a narrower single-bay tower to the north-east. Crenellations, the battlemented parapets more commonly associated with medieval castles, were popular additions during the Victorian period, when a taste for the gothick and the martial led many Irish landowners to dress their homes in the language of fortification.

The building's fabric is a document of its own long history. The central block retains exposed rubble stone walls with a red brick eaves course, slate roofs with terracotta ridge tiles, and carved limestone finials to the dormers. The windows alone span several generations of taste and necessity: six-over-six sliding sash windows with stone voussoirs at ground floor level sit alongside nine-over-nine sashes on the first floor, quarry-glazed lancets to three dormers, and, at the rear, a scattering of more recent uPVC replacements. The entrance porch, itself crenellated, has a timber door with cast-iron studs and strap hinges, details that suggest deliberate continuity with an older, more martial aesthetic. Interior features are recorded as surviving. To the south-west, a flat-roofed single-storey block with its own crenellated parapet extends the composition further, while a stone quay wall runs along the sea front and rubble enclosing walls define the property to the west and south-west.

The star-shaped fort to the north-east is now in ruinous condition. Star forts, designed with angular projecting bastions to eliminate blind spots in defensive fire, were a distinctly early modern form of military architecture, widely built across Europe and its colonies from the sixteenth century onwards. That one survives here, even in fragments, alongside a house of 1650 with a quay wall to the water, speaks to the strategic importance the site once held on this stretch of the Cork coastline.