The eighteenth-century country house at Carrignashinny in County Cork presents a south-facing front of three bays, orderly enough at first glance, but two windows sit to the west of the central doorway and none to the east, giving the ground floor an asymmetrical appearance that breaks the formal symmetry one might expect of a Georgian rural dwelling. It is a small but persistent irregularity, the kind of thing that suggests the building grew according to practical necessity rather than strict architectural ambition.

The house is two storeys, gable-ended, with large rectangular chimney stacks projecting from the gables, a common feature of substantial farmhouses of the period designed to draw heat through a building that would have been in use year-round. At the rear, additions on the east side give the whole structure an L-shaped plan, indicating that the original block was extended at some point, perhaps as the household's needs or fortunes changed over the course of the century or the one that followed. Farm buildings adjoin the west side, placing the house firmly within a working agricultural context rather than that of a purely domestic or ornamental establishment. The result is a building that sits somewhere between the ambitions of a modest country house and the pragmatism of a working farm, neither one thing entirely nor the other.