The houses that lined it belonged to a type known colloquially as Dutch Billies, a term that has attached itself to a distinctive style of tall, gabled townhouse that became surprisingly common in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Dublin, before successive waves of Georgian redevelopment quietly erased most of them.

Dutch Billy houses are characterised by their stepped or curved gables facing the street, a form that arrived in Ireland largely through the influence of Dutch and Flemish building fashions, possibly accelerated by the arrival of Protestant settlers and craftsmen in the aftermath of the Williamite wars. They tend to be narrow-fronted and several storeys high, with the ornamental gable serving as much as a social signal as a structural feature. In the case of New Row, the historian Walsh, writing in a volume edited by Gillespie and published in 1973, notes the presence of these Dutch Billy-type houses on the street, placing them within the broader fabric of a neighbourhood that developed during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, when Dublin's south city was a densely populated mixture of trade, craft, and tenement living.

New Row runs close to the Coombe and the Liberties, an area that was once the industrial engine of the city, associated with weaving, tanning, and small-scale manufacture. Very little of the earlier built fabric survives intact in this part of Dublin, which makes any remnant or documented example of Dutch Billy construction worth pausing over. If you are exploring the area on foot, the street itself is short and easily walked from Cornmarket or Patrick Street. The physical evidence of the Dutch Billy houses Walsh described may no longer be visible, and much of the surrounding streetscape has been altered substantially over the decades, but knowing the history of what once stood here changes the way even an unremarkable-looking street reads. Look at the rooflines and the proportions of whatever older buildings remain, and it becomes easier to imagine what the row once presented to the world.