Known eventually as Ormond Hall, this dwelling stood on the south side of Skinner's Row, a street that ran close to the Tholsel, the medieval building that served as Dublin's civic and commercial centre. What makes the site quietly remarkable is not what survives, because nothing does, but what it once represented: a physical foothold in the city for two of the great rival dynasties of late medieval Ireland.

The house served as the Dublin residence of the Earls of Kildare and was where Gerald FitzGerald, the 9th Earl, stayed during his periods as Lord Deputy, the Crown's chief governor in Ireland, between 1513 and 1519, 1524 and 1526, and again from 1532 to 1534. Gerald was among the most influential figures of his age, and the house on Skinner's Row would have functioned as both a domestic base and a place of political business. After the Kildare ascendancy faltered, the property passed to Piers Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond, another magnate of enormous reach, and it was under Butler ownership that it acquired the name Ormond Hall. The building was an early cage-work house, a timber-framed construction in which the structural skeleton of wooden posts and beams formed the visible exterior frame, a type once common in medieval and early modern Irish towns but now extremely rare. It survived into the mid-eighteenth century before disappearing entirely.

There is nothing to see at the site today, and pinpointing exactly where Skinner's Row ran requires a little historical map-reading; the street corresponded roughly to what is now Christchurch Place, in the vicinity of Christ Church Cathedral. For anyone drawn to the archaeology of absence, the area repays a slow walk. The Tholsel itself is also long gone, but the general layout of the medieval city is still legible in the street pattern around the cathedral. If you want to pursue the documentary evidence, Gilbert's multi-volume history of Dublin, cited in the source notes, remains the starting point for the building's early record.