The structure in question was originally a priest's chamber, a room or ancillary building attached to a parish church, used by the clergy who served it. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the broader redistribution of church property under the Tudor crown, such spaces were frequently reassigned to lay ownership, and this one was no exception.

The church to which this chamber belonged was St. Olave's, a medieval Dublin parish church dedicated to the Norwegian king and martyr Olaf II, whose cult spread widely through Norse-influenced towns and trading ports during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Dublin's connection to Scandinavian settlement made such a dedication entirely fitting. According to historian H.B. Clarke, the former priest's chamber associated with St. Olave's Church was granted to a Richard Barnwell in 1547, placing it squarely in the period when the English crown was systematically transferring ecclesiastical properties into private hands. The Barnwells were a prominent Anglo-Norman family in the Dublin area, and this grant would have been one of many such transactions reshaping the physical and religious landscape of the city during the mid-Tudor period.

The difficulty for anyone hoping to locate this building today is considerable. Clarke notes that it is not precisely located, meaning it cannot be pinpointed on a map with any certainty. The south city has been rebuilt, densified, and altered across several centuries, and the physical fabric of Tudor-era Dublin survives only in fragments. What remains of St. Olave's Church itself is similarly elusive. For those with a particular interest in post-Reformation Dublin or the redistribution of church property in the 1540s, the documentary trail, beginning with Clarke's 2002 work, offers more traction than any walk around the area is likely to provide. The interest here lies less in what can be visited and more in the layered, imperfectly recorded process by which medieval ecclesiastical Dublin was carved up and handed over, one chamber at a time.