Known locally as the Poitín Stíl, the name is a nod to illicit distilling, though the building's most immediately striking feature today is its roof: a hipped thatch of rye, a form of thatching less commonly seen than the water reed or wheaten straw found elsewhere in the country. Rye straw produces a particularly dense, ridged finish, and its use here gives the structure a quietly archaic appearance that sits at some distance from the surrounding suburban landscape.

The historical context for the building is modest but telling. Francis Elrington Ball's survey of County Dublin, published in the early twentieth century, records that Rathcoole in the mid-seventeenth century contained many "goodhouses", suggesting a settlement of some substance and solidity rather than the scattered rural cabins more commonly associated with that era. The Down Survey, the extraordinary mapping project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty to facilitate Cromwellian land redistribution, shows dwellings at Rathcoole, and the Poitín Stíl may plausibly be among those recorded. Whether the 1649 date reflects original construction or an earlier phase of an evolving structure is not fully established, but the building's three-bay, two-storey form is consistent with the kind of modest gentry or prosperous tenant house that Ball's description implies.

Rathcoole sits just off the N7 to the south-west of Dublin city, and the village retains a recognisable core despite considerable modern development around it. The Poitín Stíl is worth approaching slowly, since the recently rethatched roof is the most immediately legible evidence of the building's age and continued care. Visitors with an interest in vernacular architecture, the kind of domestic building that rarely survives in this condition, will find the three-bay elevation and hipped roofline worth examining closely. The rye thatch in particular rewards attention, especially in low winter light when its texture and layering become most apparent.