That kind of dispersal, a building cannibalised for parts while its walls slowly give way, tells you something about how early 18th-century country houses have fared in Ireland. Sunville itself is partially collapsed, though enough of its rear and one side wall still stand to give a sense of what the place once was.

The house is associated with the Penn family and dates to the early 1700s. A photograph taken in 1946 captured the entrance front before further deterioration set in, and it shows a composed, formal façade: five bays wide, one storey over a basement, with a central rectangular doorway and slim eight-light sash windows set into shallow reveals. The most distinctive feature was a tall round-headed window sitting within a baseless pediment above the centre of the front, an unusual flourish on an otherwise restrained composition. Much of the exterior was weatherslated, a practical finish in which overlapping slates are fixed to outer walls to protect against driving rain, common in Cork and Kerry. The basement was left unslated. The roof was steeply pitched with gabled ends and chimneys positioned on the gables. What survives at the rear is two storeys high, with gable-ended projections that give the plan a U-shape. The walled garden also survives, its north wall lined in brick, a material that would have been considered something of a refinement for a garden enclosure of that period.