They are said to be the descendants of two white deer given by Elizabeth I to her godchild Elizabeth Norreys, a gift that, if the lineage holds, makes these animals living threads connecting a North Cork demesne to the Elizabethan court. The house they inhabit is no less layered: a large U-shaped complex that has been accumulating fabric, function, and reinvention across several centuries.

The oldest surviving portion of the building began its life not as a house at all. The western section of the south range, with its metre-thick internal walls, mullioned and transomed windows, and four-centred arched door openings, is considered to be part of 16th-century stables. When the family castle was burnt in 1689, these stables became a refuge, and the structure gradually transformed into domestic accommodation. The embattled three-storey tower at roughly the centre of the south range gives the whole composition a faintly martial character, though the six bays to its east carry the lighter gablets of a late 18th or early 19th-century sensibility. Various additions followed through the 18th century, and in 1836 the house was substantially enlarged and rebuilt. Plans drawn in 1822 by Patrick Lee, preserved in the castle archive, set out the proposed layout, incorporating older structures while earmarking the stable block and cow house on the north side for removal. Lee's scheme is largely what survives today, with one notable exception: the new entrance front on the east side, shown on his plan, was not actually built until 1954, yet it was executed in a style consistent with the older parts of the house, complete with mullions, embattled towers, and a double gabled-fronted projection.

The wider demesne contains a walled garden to the northwest with an ice house, an underground insulated chamber used before mechanical refrigeration to store ice harvested during winter months. Farm buildings to the west-northwest retain 19th-century neo-Tudor details, adding another stylistic register to an already complicated ensemble. The whole place reads less like a unified architectural statement than like a palimpsest, each generation's priorities written over, or alongside, those of the last.