The fenestration is slightly irregular, meaning the windows do not space themselves across the facade with quite the precision a strict Georgian hand would have imposed, and the doorway is framed by a plain-moulded architrave beneath a flat, moulded hood that has the feel of someone working competently but without great ceremony. The building measures roughly 6.25 metres by 14.85 metres, with walls between 0.6 and 0.65 metres thick, solid proportions that suggest a house built to last and to keep the damp out rather than to make an architectural statement.

The core of the house dates to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and tradition, though unverified, attributes its construction to a chaplain who served in the army of William III, the Dutch Protestant king whose defeat of the Catholic James II at the Boyne in 1690 reshaped Irish land ownership as decisively as any event of the period. If the tradition has any substance, the house would be a modest material consequence of that upheaval, built by someone who came to Ireland in a military capacity and stayed. In the mid-eighteenth century, single-bay wings were added to both gable ends, each fitted with Venetian windows, a tripartite window design popular in the Palladian idiom of the time, surmounted by a lunette or Diocletian window and a pediment. Those upper windows are now blocked up, which gives the wings a slightly sealed, unfinished quality, as though the building's ambitions were interrupted partway through.