The front elevation runs to four bays, which is conventional enough for rural Irish vernacular building, but the door sits off-centre to the east rather than anchoring the middle of the facade as symmetry would demand. The roof compounds the asymmetry further: hipped at the western end, where the slope curves down without a vertical gable, and gable-ended at the eastern end, giving the two sides of the house a distinctly different character. A brick chimney, also off-centre and pushed eastward, adds one more quiet irregularity to a building that seems to have been shaped by practical necessity rather than any guiding aesthetic plan.

The house stands on the western side of Griane Borheen, positioned at right angles to the lane itself, a placement recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937. That orientation, turning the building's shoulder rather than its face to the road, is not unusual in Irish rural contexts, where shelter from prevailing weather often mattered more than a welcoming aspect to passing traffic. The thatched roof is of straw, the material traditionally most available to farming families in arable districts of Cork. A farm building projects from the south-east corner, suggesting the house was always understood as part of a working agricultural complex rather than a dwelling set apart from its land. Vernacular houses of this kind, built without architects and adapted over generations to the needs of the people living in them, are now relatively rare survivals in the Irish countryside, where thatch in particular has been replaced by slate or tile on most comparable structures.