The front elevation runs to five bays, yet the modern porch has been added off-centre, shifted to the left, and the windows beside it are pressed unusually close together, as though the original arrangement had to accommodate something that no longer exists, or something that was never quite resolved in the first place. The chimney, rising from the hipped roof, sits slightly off-centre to the west, adding to the sense of a building that has been adjusted and readjusted over time rather than executed to a single plan.

Vernacular houses of this kind were built to practical rhythms rather than architectural ones. The hipped roof, where all four sides slope downward to the eaves rather than ending in a gable, was common in parts of Munster and helped shed the wind and rain that come in hard off Bantry Bay. Thatch, still intact here, was the traditional covering for such structures throughout rural Ireland, using whatever local material was available, most often wheat straw or water reed. The slight irregularities in this building are not signs of poor craftsmanship but of a living structure, one that has been added to, repaired, and adapted by successive occupants whose priorities were warmth and function rather than symmetry.