Kilburry House sits in flat Tipperary farmland, absorbed into a working farmyard, its formal entrance marked by square stone piers topped with carved stone balls. The building is three bays wide, two storeys over a basement, and precisely one room deep, with chimneys at each gable end and a central staircase rising to a mid-way landing that once held a window, now gone. Nothing about its exterior announces a puzzle, yet the walls measure nearly ninety centimetres thick, which is notably heavy for a standard Georgian house and suggests an earlier hand at work.

The date most obviously associated with the house is 1742, carried on a plaque affixed to one of the southern farm buildings and inscribed with the initials J.C. Esq., almost certainly a member of the Cleare family. But a graveslab in the nearby town of Fethard records Thomas Cleare of Kilburry, who died on the eleventh of January 1705 at the age of sixty-six, placing the family here well before that 1742 marker. Renovation work on the house itself added another layer of ambiguity: original window openings, concealed behind later enlargements, proved to have been considerably smaller than those visible today. Smaller windows, thicker-than-average walls, a family connection running back to at least the 1630s by implication of Thomas's age at death; these details, taken together, point toward a late seventeenth-century construction date that was later updated and partially remodelled. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 also records an Old Deer Park roughly a hundred metres to the north-west of the house, a feature commonly associated with landed households of that earlier period, when maintaining a deer park was both a practical and a social statement.