What makes the building quietly unusual is not any single dramatic feature but the way it has accumulated additions across several centuries, each phase of construction visible in the fabric of the whole. The earliest part is a two-storey rectangular block, oriented along an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, with its long face presented to the street. Its original details are relatively sparse: a flat-headed entrance at ground floor and a first-floor window embrasure that is flat-headed on the outside but splayed inward, a detail typical of the period that helped draw more light into an interior.

According to the property deeds, as communicated by Marguerite Ryan, the earlier structure was first built in 1658, placing it firmly in the mid-seventeenth century, a period of considerable disruption and rebuilding across Ireland following the Cromwellian wars. The building appears on the First Ordnance Survey six-inch edition maps under the name Dalkey Lodge, recorded as a detached house within gardens. At some point the original block was joined by an eighteenth-century addition, a five-bay double-pile house, meaning a house two rooms deep rather than just one, set back slightly from the earlier structure but following the same alignment. This later addition features a steeply pitched roof, expressed chimneys, and a centrally placed Gibbs doorway, a doorway type characterised by a prominent surround of alternating large and small blocks of stone or rendered masonry, common in Georgian domestic architecture. The property was extended again toward the south in the later eighteenth century, giving the complex its layered, multi-period character. Two large flat-headed openings on the south front of the original block are not original and were introduced at some later date.

The building sits on the south side of Barnhill Road and is a private residence, so access is limited to what can be observed from the road. The earlier seventeenth-century block and the adjoining Georgian addition are most legible when viewed from the street, where the differing scales, roof pitches, and window treatments of the two main phases can be read against one another. Dalkey itself is well served by the DART rail line, and Barnhill Road is within easy walking distance of the village centre. The site rewards patient looking rather than any particular season or condition.