Every other house on the island turned its entrance to the south, away from the Atlantic weather, but this one was, as its most famous occupant put it, "reversed". That small architectural peculiarity is one of the few details we have about the physical structure of the birthplace and lifelong home of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and we have it in his own words.

Ó Criomhthain was born on the Great Blasket on St Thomas's Day, 1856, the youngest of a large family, and he lived on the island until his death in 1937. He is remembered above all as the author of two books composed in Irish. The first, "Allagar na hInise" (Island Cross-Talk), was written between 1918 and 1923 and published in 1928. The second, "An tOileánach" (The Islandman), was completed in 1923 and published in 1929, translated into English by the scholar Robin Flower. It is in the opening pages of that translation that the house comes to life most vividly. Ó Criomhthain describes a cramped dwelling roofed with rushes from the hill, where hens nested in the thatch and laid their eggs there, where a post bed sat in the corner and two further beds occupied the lower end of the room, and where two cows, an ass, the hens, and the family all shared the same walls. The food of his early childhood was eggs, butter, fish, limpets, and winkles, drawn from sea and land alike. It is an account of island subsistence that reads less like memoir than careful witness, which is precisely what Ó Criomhthain intended. His closing line in the book, that his like would not be seen again, is one of the most quoted in Irish literature, but the north-facing door and the hens in the thatch give that claim its texture.