The Poitín Stíl is not a reconstruction or a careful revival; it is, by repute, simply still there, doing roughly what it has always done, in a structure that predates the Williamite Wars, the Act of Union, and most of what most people think of as Irish history.

The building itself is two storeys with three bays, and the detail that tends to stop architectural surveyors in their tracks is the roof: hipped and thatched with rye, a material less commonly used than water reed and one that gives the thatch a denser, more textured appearance. The first-floor windows are set as dormers into that roof, and an external chimney stack rises from the north gable. A date of 1649 is traditionally assigned to the structure, which would place its construction in the turbulent years of the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland. The wider context supports the idea that this was once a more substantial settlement than it might appear today. Francis Elrington Ball, writing in his history of County Dublin in the early twentieth century, recorded that Rathcoole in the mid-seventeenth century was said to contain many good houses. The Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a remarkable mapping project carried out under William Petty to catalogue land ownership after the Cromwellian conquest, shows numerous dwellings at Rathcoole, suggesting a village of some significance at precisely the period when the Poitín Stíl is said to have been built.

Rathcoole is accessible from Dublin city by bus along the N7 corridor, and the village is easy to navigate on foot. The pub sits at the western end, close to the Naas road junction, so it is not difficult to locate. The thatched roof is the obvious thing to look for from the street, though it is worth pausing to take in the proportions of the facade and the chimney stack before going inside. Rye thatch weathers and requires maintenance, so the roof visible today will have been relaid and repaired across the centuries; what persists is the form and the method, rather than the original material itself.