It has been identified as a Dutch Billy, a building type that was once extraordinarily common in Dublin but is now so rare that each surviving example is treated as something of an architectural anomaly. The date of its construction is not recorded, which is itself telling; these buildings belong to a period of the city's history that left fewer paper trails than the better-documented Georgian era that eventually displaced them.

The Dutch Billy is a vernacular house form characterised by a curved or stepped gable facing the street, a design associated with the architectural fashions that arrived in Ireland in the late seventeenth century, partly through Dutch and Flemish influence and partly through the broader currents of northern European Protestant mercantile culture. Dublin once had hundreds of them, filling the streets of the Liberties and other older quarters, and they were the ordinary domestic architecture of a city in the process of rapid commercial expansion. By the nineteenth century they had fallen out of fashion and many were demolished, altered beyond recognition, or simply allowed to decay. Architectural historian Barry O'Reilly is among those who have worked to document surviving examples, and it is through his identification that this particular house has been recorded as belonging to the type.

Because the precise address is not publicly recorded in the available notes, finding this building requires some patience. The south city area encompasses a wide sweep of older streets, and the most productive approach is to walk the lanes and terraces of the Liberties and the surrounding neighbourhoods with an eye on the roofline rather than the shopfronts. A Dutch Billy announces itself, if it has not been too heavily altered, through its gable end rather than its facade: look for the curved or stepped profile rising above the parapet where most Georgian houses would simply present a flat or hipped roof. Given how few remain, spotting one intact is a genuine piece of luck.