Demolished as recently as 1977, the building had by then already been a ruin for well over a century, fire-damaged and derelict, its name appearing on the First Edition Ordnance Survey maps with the blunt notation "in ruins." That such an architecturally refined structure could survive long enough to be photographed, mapped, and ultimately levelled by human hand rather than time alone makes its absence feel oddly deliberate.

Brazil House was built around 1632 to 1640 by Sir Richard Bolton, who served as Lord Chancellor of Ireland under King Charles I. The house was rectangular in plan, two storeys high, with multiple gables and projecting chimney stacks built in brick. Those stacks were not plain utilitarian features; they were ornamented with arcading and decorative plaster pendants, and at least one contained a built-in oven. The exterior walls were finished in a thin, lightly roughcast plaster, while the quoins (the dressed corner stones) and the surrounds of the windows and doors were worked to a finer finish, using what is described as a block and start design, a form of decorative plastering that articulates the edges of a facade. The gables were fitted with fine brick skewbacks, the angled stones that support the sloping edge of a gable wall. It was, in other words, a house built with considerable care for its own appearance.

The site is protected under a preservation order made under the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014 (PO no. 6/1977), which gives some legal weight to what is now largely a footprint in the ground. Test excavations carried out in 2007 under licence number 07E0119 recovered a significant amount of structural debris from the area of the demolished house, confirming the building's former extent. Investigators also identified a substantial ditch to the southwest of the site, aligned northwest to southeast and up to five metres wide; its full depth was not established. Animal bone was recovered from the fill of the ditch, though nothing that could be precisely dated. For anyone visiting the area around Brazil, Co. Dublin, what remains is less a visible monument than an archaeological presence, its most legible traces now held in excavation records rather than standing above the soil.