What makes it worth pausing over is the peculiar layering visible in the fabric of the building itself: a late eighteenth-century house that was already being modified before the Victorian era was out, and an outbuilding tucked to the rear that appears to predate the main house entirely, suggesting the site had some kind of working presence before the Newenhams raised their three-storey residence.

The Newenham family, who built the house, were part of the Anglo-Irish mercantile and gentry class that shaped much of Cork's civic and architectural life in the Georgian period. The house they constructed follows a straightforward rectangular plan, with a five-bay southern entrance front, string courses marking the horizontal divisions between floors, and bow projections on both the east and west elevations. A sprocketed hipped roof, meaning one with small angled brackets at the eaves that give a slight outward kick to the roofline, sits above a carved limestone cornice, and a single off-centre chimney survives. By the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were being drawn in 1842, the house carried the name Summer Hill, a common enough Georgian conceit suggesting pastoral retreat even within comfortable reach of the city. The central porch, however, reads as a later addition, its detailing more in keeping with the late nineteenth century than the building's original construction date.

The outbuilding to the rear is the quietly anomalous detail that rewards closer attention. Its steeply pitched gabled roof and concave cornice suggest a construction date earlier than the main house, raising the possibility that it served some agricultural or estate function on the site before the Newenham residence was built around or alongside it. The northern face of the main house is now largely hidden behind later extensions, which means the building presents itself as a palimpsest, each phase of addition and alteration readable in elevation if not always easy to date precisely.