The building began its life around 1770 as a three-bay south-facing house with a pedimented breakfront, the central projecting section of a façade designed to give formal emphasis, and over time a second block was added to the rear, rotating the whole logic of the building and producing a U-plan structure whose original Venetian doorway, with its distinctive arched centrepiece flanked by rectangular lights, has since been converted into a window. A round tower of two stages at the north-east corner of the rear block, with pointed windows, adds a further layer of chronology to the whole composition.

The family behind all this building work came to the land by a circuitous route shaped by the upheavals of seventeenth-century Ireland. Martin Blake fitz Andrew, who had served as sheriff of Galway town in 1648 to 1649, was dispossessed of his property by the Cromwellian Commonwealth in 1655 and transplanted to Cummer, a few miles away. In 1671 he bought the lands of Ballyglooneen from Charles Holcraft, a Cromwellian planter who had himself acquired them during the same period of confiscation and resettlement, but Martin continued to live at Cummer until his death in 1691. His eldest son Peter died just a month later, and the estate passed to Peter's son, also Martin, who was the one who eventually moved to Ballyglooneen and built the original house in the earlier eighteenth century. The family expanded steadily and by the 1870s the Blakes held over ten thousand acres in the locality. That era of landownership wound down slowly; by March 1916 the family had accepted a final offer of over sixty thousand pounds from the Congested Districts Board, a body established to redistribute land in overcrowded rural areas, for nearly nine thousand eight hundred acres. In 1964 the house was purchased by Opus Dei and used as a conference centre before being sold into private ownership in 2014.