Features like these are associated with domestic building conventions of the late seventeenth century, and the house, two storeys high with an attic lit by small gable windows and two brick chimneys sitting atop each main gable, carries its probable age in its proportions and layout rather than in any dramatic flourish.

The story behind the site reaches back to the Cromwellian land settlements of the 1650s. A manuscript map held in the National Library of Ireland, recording part of the Barony of Kilnemana in County Tipperary as it was parcelled out to Major Bolton's troop in Colonel Pretty's regiment in 1656, shows a house positioned roughly where Kilmore House later appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840. That correspondence between the two maps is suggestive rather than conclusive, but it ties the building, or its predecessor on the same ground, to the wholesale redistribution of land that followed the Cromwellian conquest. Soldiers and officers were frequently paid in confiscated Irish land during this period, and the Bolton mentioned in the map title was one among many military figures who acquired property in Tipperary through that process. The T-plan of the house, a footprint in which a wing projects from the main block, was a practical and fairly common form for rural gentry houses of the era.