The southern entrance front stretches to nine bays, with a three-bay central breakfront stepping forward from the main wall to give the facade a sense of layered depth. At its centre sits a fanlighted doorcase framed by an entablature and engaged Tuscan columns, the latter being columns that are attached to the wall rather than free-standing, lending formality without bulk. Plate glass sash windows, a parapet wall, and stone quoins left exposed at the corners of both house and breakfront complete a composition that is restrained without being cold. The hipped roof, four bays deep with a central guttered valley, sits above all of it with an air of careful calculation.

The house dates from the late eighteenth century and occupies a position overlooking Lough Mahon in the Lee Estuary, east of Cork city. What gives it an unusual coherence as a composition is the way the ancillary buildings are handled. Screen walls punctuated by rusticated niches, that is, wall recesses with deliberately rough-hewn stonework surround, connect the main block to office wings that extend behind it. The forward ends of those wings are treated as two-storey pavilions in their own right, each with an oculus, a small circular window, set into the upper storey. The wings then return inward to enclose a cobbled yard at the rear. This kind of integrated planning, where service buildings are drawn into the architectural composition rather than left as afterthoughts, was a mark of considered Georgian design. Inside, a bifurcating staircase and an early nineteenth-century interior described by the architectural historian Bence-Jones in 1978 as exceptionally well preserved give the house a depth that its exterior only hints at.