Its front elevation runs to four bays, with the doorway placed off-centre to the left and tucked behind a porch, while the chimney sits off-centre to the right. That asymmetry, modest as it sounds, is characteristic of the vernacular building tradition in rural Ireland, where houses grew according to need and circumstance rather than any imposed plan. The hipped roof of thatch, in which all four sides slope down to the eaves rather than ending in gable walls, is a less common form than the simpler gabled thatch, and its survival here in an occupied house makes it a relatively rare example of a living vernacular structure.

What makes the setting stranger is what is no longer there. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the first systematic large-scale mapping of Ireland and a document of enormous value for tracking what has been lost, shows a named settlement cluster at Barnaviddane. That cluster does not survive. The house itself does not even appear on the same map, which means it was either built or substantially altered after 1842, and it now stands in a place that was once more populated. The townland name persists; the community it once identified has gone entirely.