It is four bays wide and three storeys tall, rising to about twelve metres at the parapet, and it sits on a plot roughly ten metres across. Nothing about those dimensions sounds remarkable until you start looking at what is going on behind the façade, and in particular at the roof, which runs perpendicular to the street rather than parallel to it. That orientation, combined with an M-profile pitch, is the kind of detail that tends to catch the eye of architectural historians and pass everyone else by entirely.

The M-profile roof is the clue that animates this building. An M-profile describes two parallel pitched roof sections whose valley runs between them, creating a shape in cross-section that resembles the letter. This form was common in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before improved waterproofing and drainage made the internal valley less of a liability. Combined with the two linear chimneystacks sitting centrally along the east and west party walls, and the internal corner fireplaces those stacks would have served, the overall arrangement points toward an early-eighteenth-century date. Corner fireplaces were a practical response to the constraints of narrow urban plots, allowing heat to reach more of a room without eating into the usable floor space along the main walls. Taken together, these features suggest the building may be older than its street frontage implies, possibly preserving an earlier structural logic beneath later alterations. Formal investigation, and ideally internal access, would be needed to say anything more definitive.

The building is recorded as a former house, meaning its current use is something other than residential. It sits within the broader grain of south city Dublin, where streets that were laid out in the early Georgian period still follow their original lines even as individual buildings have been added to, subdivided, or stripped back over the centuries. For anyone interested in urban fabric rather than set-piece monuments, this kind of structure rewards a slow walk and a willingness to look upward. The parapet line, the bay spacing, and the chimneystacks visible from the street are the features most accessible from the pavement. The M-profile roof, the detail that makes the building genuinely interesting to specialists, is not something you can see without getting above or behind it.