Three storeys over a basement, six bays wide on its entrance front, with a central two-bay breakfront projecting forward and a round-headed doorway flanked by narrow sidelights: these are the proportions and gestures of late eighteenth-century Irish gentry architecture, the kind of confident, ordered composition that announced a family's ambitions to anyone approaching up the avenue. The hipped roof is long gone, but patches of weather slating cling to the walls, a detail that speaks to how recently, in the long span of a building's life, this place was still being maintained against the elements.

The house dates to the late 1700s, a period when the Cork countryside was being reshaped by the construction of substantial rural seats, many of them built to a broadly Palladian or Georgian template. At Warrensgrove, the builder paid particular attention to the rear elevation as well as the front, which is not always the case with houses of this type. A large central round-headed window dominates the back facade, suggesting an interior room of some importance directly behind it, perhaps a drawing room or staircase hall designed to catch the light. The arrangement of the wider estate is also still traceable on the ground. Curtain walls, each punctuated with decorative niches, connect the main house to a two-storey farm complex set around a courtyard to the north. That northern range is described as ornate, which is a small but telling word: it suggests the farmyard here was not purely functional but was meant to be seen as part of a composed ensemble. The remains of a walled garden lie to the east, the kind of enclosed kitchen garden that would have been integral to the household economy of any self-sufficient country seat of the period.