Those arches have since been infilled with windows and a door, which gives the building a slightly sealed-off quality today, its original porousness visible only in the ghost of the arcade rhythm across the front elevation. The structure is two storeys of random-rubble limestone with ashlar detail, meaning the main dressed stonework is reserved for the decorative elements rather than the entire surface. Most striking is the central pedimented breakfront, a slightly projecting section of the facade crowned with a triangular gable, at the apex of which sits a blind oculus, a circular recess with no opening, purely ornamental.

Kilworth's commercial ambitions stretch back further than the building itself. The town appears in records as a market centre as early as 1299, though its documented history becomes more substantial in the early seventeenth century, when it passed into the hands of the Fleetwood family. By 1685 it was formally described as a market town, and by 1750 the writer Charles Smith was noting it as a thriving place with a good turnpike road running through it from Dublin. That road-borne connectivity seems to have sustained it for a time, but Kilworth's fortunes turned as the nearby town of Fermoy grew through the nineteenth century, drawing trade and traffic away. The market-house, labelled plainly as 'Market Ho.' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, survived that decline and was restored in the early 1980s, after which it passed into commercial use. A lean-to extension at the rear partially shelters the steps leading up to a first-floor door, a modest addition that quietly acknowledges the building's continued working life.