The frontage of No. 16 was refaced around 1930, giving it the tidy, unremarkable appearance of interwar commercial Dublin. But behind that skin, and particularly when viewed from the rear, a rather older building makes itself known.

The evidence for earlier origins lies in two places: the fenestration pattern on the rear façade, which follows the proportions and rhythm typical of late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century construction, and the roof structure, a substantial single-span form that would have been an entirely normal choice for a builder working in that period but is rarely preserved intact this far into a building's life. Aungier Street itself was developed from the 1660s onwards, when Sir Francis Aungier, whose family gave the street its name, began laying out a planned residential district to the south of the old city. The street attracted merchants, professionals, and eventually the kind of mixed commercial and residential use that buildings like No. 16 were built to serve. The shopfront at ground level, while a later addition in its present form, reflects a pattern of ground-floor trade that has been part of this stretch of the city for centuries.

The building is mid-terrace and in active use, so there is no formal access to the interior. What can be appreciated from the street is the slight awkwardness between the 1930s refacing and the floors above it, where the proportions quietly disagree with the modernised ground level. The rear is not publicly visible from any obvious vantage point, but the roof profile, if glimpsed from an adjacent angle, gives a clearer sense of the original structure beneath. Aungier Street is easily walked from St Stephen's Green or from the Dame Street end of the city, and No. 16 sits unremarkably in the terrace unless you know to look for the seam between what was added and what was left.