Completed in 1724, it originally faced a small harbour, its eastern entrance front looking out over the waterborne commerce it was built to regulate. That function ended in 1814, when a new customs house was built further downstream, and the old building was left to reinvent itself, which it has done, repeatedly and with some success.

After the customs service departed, the structure became home to the Cork Institution, an early nineteenth-century body concerned with scientific and literary education in the city. Then, in the 1880s, it took on the role it still holds today: a home first for the Crawford Municipal School of Art, and now for the Crawford Art Gallery. A large extension was added to the south side during that refurbishment, built in a style sympathetic enough to the original that the two portions read as a coherent whole. The original 1724 building is constructed in red brick with limestone detailing, a combination characteristic of early Georgian civic architecture in Ireland. The entrance front is five bays wide and three storeys tall, with shallow single-bay projections at each end. The limestone window surrounds carry triangular pediments on the main body of the facade, with rounded pediments on the projecting bays. At the centre, the ground-floor doorway and the first-floor window above it are framed by an aediculated surround, meaning they are set within a formal architectural frame of pilasters or columns supporting a small entablature, a device that signals importance and draws the eye upward. Quoins, the bold alternating blocks of masonry at the corners of the projections, add further solidity, while a limestone string course marks the transition above the ground floor and a projecting cornice runs under the eaves.