The structure, recorded on Ordnance Survey maps of 1902 and 1935 under the name Carhuegarriffe, still presents a composed enough face to the north: three bays wide, with a round-headed door opening at its centre, the kind of restrained symmetry that characterised domestic architecture at the turn of the nineteenth century. But the hipped roof, which would once have swept down on all four sides from a central chimney stack, has collapsed inward, and the rear basement storey and its gabled addition suggest a building that was more substantial in its working life than its current state implies.

The house dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a period when landowners across Munster were rebuilding or improving their rural seats in a broadly Neoclassical manner. The walls here were weatherslated, meaning the external face was covered with overlapping slates fixed to battens, a practical measure against the wet Cork climate that also gave such buildings a distinctive grey, layered appearance. The projecting eaves, another detail that survives, would have helped throw rainwater clear of those walls. The place-name recorded on the old maps, Carhuegarriffe, points to a longer history of settlement at the townland, even if the house itself belongs to a relatively recent chapter of it.