On the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, a cartographic project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to document land ownership across Ireland, this building appears with the notation 'a Chimney House'. At a time when chimneys were far from universal in rural domestic architecture, their presence was considered significant enough to warrant special mention. That detail alone places the structure among the more substantial dwellings of its era in County Kilkenny.

The house sits on a north-west-facing slope in gently undulating farmland, and from the front of the building the medieval church and round tower at Grangefertagh are visible roughly 230 metres to the south-east, a pairing that quietly anchors this landscape in several centuries of occupation at once. The building is one room deep and measures just over seventeen and a half metres in length externally, with walls between 0.73 and 0.8 metres thick. A large, bulky chimney remains on the south-west gable. For most of its life the house was thatched, with a considerably steeper roof pitch than it carries today, but in 1957 it was substantially remodelled: the thatch was replaced with slate, the roof pitch reduced, and many of the original internal timber beams were taken out. Around 1988 further changes followed, including the replacement of a projecting masonry chimney on the north-east gable and the addition of a two-bay extension. The fenestration visible today is not original. Inside, a dog-leg stair with a ramped handrail and simply moulded balusters survives; the ramped handrail style became fashionable in the eighteenth century, while the decorative stair brackets are closer in character to nineteenth-century examples, suggesting the interior accumulated changes across a long period of continuous habitation. The house remains inhabited, which is perhaps why it has been altered so thoroughly, and why it has survived at all.