The four-storey townhouse at 6 Upper Ormond Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey, is a case in point. Its early nineteenth-century façade is what most people see, two bays wide and composed in the restrained manner of its period. What most people do not see is that behind it, largely intact, sits the inner core of a late seventeenth-century house, a structure several generations older than the face it now wears.

The evidence for this earlier building is threaded through the fabric of the present one. A central chimney stack survives, along with an oak-panelled staircase featuring barley-sugar balusters, the turned spiral columns popular in domestic interiors of the late 1600s. The position of the roof timbers is particularly telling. According to architectural historian Freddie Dwyer, they indicate that the original structure was heavier than what now stands, with gabled fronts and rear, a form typical of the grander merchant and professional houses that lined the quays in the decades after the Restoration. At some point in the early nineteenth century, the building received its current street-facing treatment, a common enough practice in Georgian and Regency Dublin, where modernising a façade was preferable to rebuilding from scratch, and the older bones were simply left where they were.

Upper Ormond Quay runs along the north side of the Liffey between Capel Street Bridge and the Four Courts, and number 6 sits within a streetscape that has changed considerably over the centuries. The building is in private use and not open to the public, so the seventeenth-century interior is not something a casual visitor can simply walk in to see. What is worth doing is pausing on the quayside and looking at the façade itself with the layering in mind, noting how the proportions and massing of the structure suggest something older working its way through the later skin. The quays here retain a number of similarly complex buildings, and the exercise of reading them as accumulated objects rather than uniform streetscape tends to change how the whole riverside looks.