The chimneybreast sits centred on the north party wall rather than where you might expect it; the staircase is positioned oddly; the roof form and the arrangement of windows front and rear do not quite follow the logic of the plainly Georgian streetscape around it. Taken together, these internal signatures point to something older and stranger underneath the current facade, a building that began its life wearing a very different face.

According to a survey carried out by the Dublin Civic Trust in 2012, the house dates to somewhere between 1680 and 1730, placing its construction in the decades when Dutch and Flemish influence on Dublin's domestic architecture was at its most direct. The evidence suggests it was originally built in what is known as the 'Dutch billy' style, a type common in Dublin at the time but now almost entirely vanished from the streetscape. Dutch billies were gable-fronted houses whose stepped or curved rooflines faced the street, giving early eighteenth-century Dublin a skyline closer in character to Amsterdam or Antwerp than to the Hanoverian brick terraces that later replaced them. The house sits on a plot roughly six metres wide, rises to around ten metres at the front parapet, and presents three bays to the street, dimensions that fit comfortably within the Dutch billy tradition even as the facade itself has been altered beyond recognition.

The house is a mid-terrace property, meaning it presents as part of a continuous run of buildings rather than as a freestanding structure, and there is nothing in its current exterior to announce its age or its unusual origins to a passing pedestrian. The interest here is almost entirely architectural and inferential, a matter of reading the bones of a building through the overlay of later changes. Anyone with an eye for early urban fabric will find the south city rewarding in general, and this house is a useful reminder that Dublin's surviving pre-Georgian building stock, though scarce and often disguised, has not entirely disappeared.