It was a Dutch Billy, a building type that gave Dublin's older streetscapes much of their character before wholesale clearance stripped them away, and this particular example survived until 1903, when it was finally demolished after a lifespan that nobody has managed to pin to a precise date.

The term Dutch Billy refers to a style of tall, gabled townhouse associated with the influx of Dutch and Huguenot craftsmen and merchants who settled in Dublin from the late seventeenth century onwards, many of them in the Liberties. The historian Walsh, writing in 1973, recorded the building's key features in some detail. It was double-fronted, meaning it presented two bays to the street rather than the narrow single-bay façade more typical of the type. It had plain doorways, string courses (the horizontal bands of moulding that divide a façade into tiers), and semi-circular segmental relieving arches, which are shallow arches built into the masonry above openings to distribute the load of the wall above. A shuttered winch projected from the upper storey, the kind of hoist used to lift goods into storage floors, suggesting the building had a commercial or warehouse function alongside whatever domestic use it served. Most distinctive of all were the corner fireplaces, tucked into the angles of rooms rather than centred on a wall, all fed by a single massive central chimney stack.

The site today sits in an area that has been substantially rebuilt over the twentieth century, and nothing of the original building remains above ground. The junction of New Row and Black Pitts is in the Liberties, one of Dublin's oldest working districts, south-west of St Patrick's Cathedral. For anyone interested in what the streetscape once looked like, the Walsh reference, published in 1973, remains one of the more precise surviving records of a building type that was common enough in its day to be largely undocumented, and rare enough by the twentieth century to be genuinely irreplaceable.