It was erected between 1638 and 1640, served its purpose for several decades, and is now known to historians almost entirely through a single drawing made by the English topographical artist Francis Place in 1698. No street number, no surviving fabric, no precise location on the quayside has been confirmed.

The building's significance lies in what came after it. It was the direct predecessor to the Custom House designed by Thomas Burgh, completed in 1706, which itself would later be superseded by James Gandon's celebrated riverside building of the 1780s. Burgh, the Irish Surveyor General, was responsible for a range of civic and military structures in early eighteenth-century Dublin, and his 1706 Custom House represented a more formal architectural statement than the modest twin-gabled structure it replaced. Francis Place's 1698 drawing, cited by the architectural historian Rolf Loeber in 1978, provides the clearest evidence of what the earlier building looked like, a practical vernacular structure with the double-gabled roofline common to commercial buildings of the mid-seventeenth century in these islands. The date range of 1638 to 1640 places its construction during the Lord Deputyship of Thomas Wentworth, a period of significant administrative activity in Dublin.

Because the building's location has not been precisely established, there is no specific spot on the north quays that can be pointed to with confidence. What a visitor can do is walk the stretch of quays between Grattan Bridge and the later Gandon Custom House and consider how thoroughly that riverfront was remade over the course of a century and a half. The Francis Place drawing, which records the building as it appeared just a few years before its replacement, exists in archival collections and has been reproduced in scholarly literature. For anyone interested in the pre-Georgian fabric of the city, it serves as a reminder that the quays were already a working, built-up environment long before the grand civic remodelling of the eighteenth century got under way.