Built around 1716, the original structure was described by the writer Gillman in 1895 as sixty feet across the front, twenty-five feet deep, three storeys high, and finished with a chimney at each of its four corners, a compact but deliberate piece of early eighteenth-century domestic architecture. What makes its origins particularly curious is the source of its building material: stone was taken from the nearby Inishleena Abbey, a medieval monastic site whose fabric was systematically dismantled to raise the new house. Recycling stonework from older ecclesiastical or defensive structures was common practice in Ireland during this period, but it does give Cronody a layered quality, two histories folded into one set of walls.

The house came with a small world arranged around it. To the south, on higher ground, the remains of a dovecote still survive; dovecotes were practical structures where pigeons were kept as a reliable source of fresh meat and eggs, and their presence on an estate generally indicated a household of some standing. Further south still, overlooking the river, a tea-house was constructed around the same time as the main house, around 1716, a small pleasure building of the kind fashionable among the gentry of the period. By 1894 only its foundations remained. That same year, during some kind of ground disturbance to the rear of the house, six masonry vats came to light, the remnants of a cider-making operation. Six vats suggests production well beyond domestic use, hinting at an estate economy in which the orchard and the press were as important as any formal garden feature. The present house on the site is a later replacement, a three-bay, two-storey gable-ended building of late nineteenth-century appearance, built close to where the earlier structure stood.