The building is a Dutch Billy, a house type that was once enormously common in Dublin but has since become genuinely rare, reduced by centuries of demolition and rebuilding to only a scattered handful of surviving examples. The term refers to a distinctive style of tall, gabled townhouse associated with the influx of Dutch and Flemish influence into Ireland during the late seventeenth century, particularly in the years following the arrival of William of Orange. The gabled front, rising to a peak rather than sitting behind the flat parapet typical of Georgian construction, is the defining feature, and it gives buildings of this type a profile more familiar from Amsterdam or Antwerp than from the Dublin streetscape most visitors encounter.

The Dutch Billy form arrived in Irish towns during the latter decades of the 1600s and spread quickly among the merchant classes, who favoured the style for its practicality as much as its Continental associations. The steeply pitched roofs and stepped or curved gables were well suited to narrow urban plots, and the type became the standard form of prosperous Dublin housing before the Georgian grid reshaped the city's ambitions and its architecture. Eustace Street itself was developed during this period, when the area south of the Liffey was being built up as a centre of civic and commercial life. The precise date of number 16 is not recorded, which is itself a common fate for buildings of this era, many of which were put up without the kind of formal documentation that later centuries took for granted.

Eustace Street runs between Dame Street and the riverside streets of Temple Bar, and the building sits among a mixture of later commercial premises and cultural institutions, including the Irish Film Institute a few doors along. The Dutch Billy gable is best appreciated from the street directly in front of the building, where the roofline becomes clearly legible against the sky. It is worth looking slowly at the upper storeys rather than the ground floor, which has been altered over time as ground-level shopfronts and entrances tend to be. The street itself is not especially busy, which makes unhurried looking straightforward enough.