The site is remarkable less for what survives than for what it represents: an eighteenth-century ecclesiastical residence commissioned at a precise moment in Dublin's architectural coming-of-age, tucked into one of the oldest streets in the city.

The building dates to 1731 to 1733 and was constructed as the New Deanery for Dean Welbore Ellis of Christ Church Cathedral. The architectural historian Edward McParland, writing in a 1992 essay published in a tribute volume to the scholar Maurice Craig, attributed the deanery to Edward Lovett Pearce, the gifted architect who also designed the Irish Houses of Parliament on College Green, now Bank of Ireland. Pearce was among the most accomplished practitioners working in Ireland at the time, and the Fishamble Street commission, though modest in ecclesiastical terms, placed a significant designer in direct service of the cathedral chapter. The site is noted by John Bradley in his 1984 survey of Dublin, which flags it as an eighteenth-century deanery location worthy of record. A deanery, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply the official residence of a cathedral dean, equivalent in function to a rectory or vicarage but attached to a more senior clerical office.

Fishamble Street itself repays a slow walk. It is best known to many as the venue where Handel conducted the first performance of his Messiah in 1742, a fact that tends to overshadow everything else about the lane. The street descends steeply from the cathedral precinct and retains something of its medieval grain even amid later development. The deanery site sits within this compressed historic landscape, and while the building in its Pearce-era form may not be fully intact, the general location on the western slope of the ridge below Christ Church is identifiable. Anyone with an interest in Georgian Dublin's less celebrated commissions, or in the institutional fabric that once supported the established church in the city, will find the street worth the short detour from the more visited precincts nearby.