The building at Nos. 91 to 93 is easy to walk past without registering what it is, but the stonework repays a closer look: two small square-headed windows with hood-mouldings survive on the gable facing the street, and an armorial plaque bearing the arms of the original owners, though with its 1580 date literally broken off, remains on the façade. The rear of the building stretches all the way to St. Mary's Lane, meaning the footprint of this single merchant's house once ran from a busy commercial street to the boundary of a medieval churchyard.

The house was built in 1580 by Henry Shee and his wife Frances Crisp. Shee was a figure of considerable civic standing; he served as mayor of Kilkenny in both 1601 and 1611. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, the property was recorded in some detail: an eighteen-roomed slated stone house measuring roughly 19.5 metres long and 6.7 metres wide, accompanied by a part-stone, part-timber stable and a small outbuilding of wattles and clay. The occupier at that point was listed as Richard Shee. The building is considered one of the earliest surviving examples of the Renaissance-style townhouses that merchant families raised in Kilkenny during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period when the city's wealthy Old English community invested heavily in elaborate urban architecture. The structure survived largely intact, including much of its original timberwork, until around 1928, when it was gutted internally to accommodate a Woolworths department store. That intervention removed the floors and internal fittings, but left much of the outer shell standing, including a cut-stone fireplace and chimney breast in the north gable, the south gable, and part of the west façade. Photographs taken before 1928 show that the building originally had two gables facing onto High Street, as well as an octagonal chimney that was removed around 1949. Archaeological test-excavations at the rear of the site uncovered what may be the boundary wall separating the house's back yard from the medieval graveyard of St. Mary's church, and human skeletal remains consistent with that cemetery were found just to the east of it.