The south-facing entrance front presents two storeys over a basement, formal and composed, with five bays, a central door flanked by sidelights, and a flight of steps rising to meet it. Walk around to the rear, and the slope of the ground reveals a full third storey, the house having been built into a north-facing hillside so that the land itself absorbs one entire level. The collapsed roof was hipped, and the off-centre chimneys still stand. Some of the rectangular window openings retain their brick dressings with limestone keystones, small survivals of the craft that went into a building now largely open to the sky.

The house dates from the late eighteenth century, a period when the construction of substantial gentry houses across Cork was common enough that many have since vanished without much record. What sets Nettleville apart is how intact the working landscape around it remains. Some 150 metres to the south-east, the stone farm buildings are still in use, reached through a tall archway topped with a bellcote, its bell still in place. A bellcote in this context is a small open turret or frame designed to hold a bell, used here almost certainly to signal work hours across the farmyard. Inside that yard, circular stone stands survive, the kind used to store and raise hay or corn stacks clear of damp ground. A restored gatelodge completes a demesne that, despite the roofless house at its centre, retains a surprising amount of its original agricultural fabric.