The front elevation runs to four bays, but the doorway sits off-centre to the right rather than at the middle, and the brick chimney rises from the left of the gable roof rather than from its apex or from a balanced opposing position. The effect is not careless; it is the kind of practical asymmetry that accumulated over generations of rural building, where function and incremental change shaped a facade more honestly than any formal plan could.

Vernacular houses of this type, built without an architect and adapted to the needs of whoever lived in them, are among the most telling survivals in the Irish countryside. The gable-ended thatched roof is the defining form of the traditional Irish farmhouse, widespread from at least the seventeenth century and constructed using locally available materials, with walls of stone or mass concrete and roofs thatched in straw or reed. The off-centre chimney suggests the interior arrangement did not follow a standard two-room plan, or that the house was extended or altered at some point, pushing the hearth away from where a more regular design might have placed it. The house in Glenarousk was recorded as occupied, which itself sets it apart from the many thatched structures that survive only as roofless shells or consolidated ruins.