The Dutch Billy, as these houses were known, was a distinctive form of urban domestic building that arrived in Ireland during the late seventeenth century, brought over largely through the influence of Huguenot and Dutch settlers. The style is recognisable by its curved or stepped gable end facing the street, a form common across the Low Countries and parts of northern Germany, but which found particular favour in Dublin during the late 1600s and early 1700s. At a time when the city was expanding rapidly and prosperous merchants wanted homes that signalled their Continental connections, the Dutch Billy became a fashionable choice for the streets of the old city.

According to Walsh, writing in 1973, a house in this style stood on the corner of Mitre Alley and St. Patrick's Close South, placing it squarely in the Liberties, the historic district that once lay outside the jurisdiction of Dublin Corporation and which became a centre of weaving and trade. The Dutch Billy type was once abundant in this part of the city, clustered particularly around the Coombe, New Row, and the streets feeding into St. Patrick's Cathedral. Most were demolished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, victims of slum clearance, redevelopment, and plain neglect. The example noted by Walsh on this corner was part of that now largely vanished streetscape, its survival into the eighteenth or nineteenth century making it something of a late remnant of a building fashion that had already fallen out of use elsewhere in the city.

The site today sits close to St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the immediate area still carries traces of its medieval and early modern layout in the irregular lines of its laneways and closes. Mitre Alley itself is a narrow passage, and the junction with St. Patrick's Close South is easy to walk past without pausing. There is nothing standing now to mark what Walsh recorded, but the location rewards a slow look at the ground plan of the streets, which preserves something of the old urban grain even where the buildings above have long since changed. Anyone with an interest in the lost domestic architecture of early modern Dublin will find the general vicinity, including the surviving streetscape around the cathedral close, worth a careful walk.