Only the southern portion of what was once a T-plan structure still stands, and even that partial shell tells an oddly specific story. The chimney stack, which protrudes visibly into the interior space rather than sitting flush with the wall, is characteristic of late seventeenth-century construction practice, a period when the relationship between structural mass and domestic comfort was still being negotiated in Irish rural architecture. The stairs, meanwhile, were tucked into the rear projection of the T, a practical arrangement that kept circulation separate from the main rooms, each of which was heated by a gable fireplace.

The land on which the house stands has a traceable history that predates the building itself. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a mid-seventeenth-century inventory of Irish land ownership compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, recorded the lands of Lickfinn as belonging to James, Earl of Ormond. No house is mentioned in that document, which suggests the structure was raised sometime after the survey was completed, most likely in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The T-plan form, where the body of the house is crossed or extended by a rear wing, was a relatively common configuration for modest gentry houses of that period, allowing for functional separation of spaces within a compact footprint. What was probably a two-storey house with an attic above has been reduced to a single surviving half, one room wide, the northern portion lost entirely.