The house itself is not that old, but the plaque almost certainly is, and it is thought to have been lifted from Meldrum Castle, a possibly early seventeenth-century fortified house that still stands about 400 metres to the east. That small act of salvage, practical or sentimental, quietly announces that this building is more layered than it first appears.

Meldrum House is in fact two houses grown together. The older portion, at the western end, dates to the late seventeenth century. It is one room deep, four bays wide, with projecting gable-fronted end bays, and built largely of rubble limestone, though the external render hides much of the original fabric. The ground floor is unusually high, and there are signs that the surrounding ground level has been raised by over a metre, which together suggest the building once had a basement, now either buried or incorporated into the later structure. Around 1730, a five-bay, two-storey-over-basement early Georgian house was added to the east, built so that it physically incorporates the older building's eastern gable wall, with openings knocked through at ground, first, and attic levels to connect the two. The result is not a conversion or a rebuild but a genuine layering, two distinct structures sharing a wall and a roof, each readable if you know where to look. In front of the older section, a brick-lined well fed a water pump set directly against the facade, with storage compartments on either side, an arrangement that speaks to the self-sufficiency expected of a rural house of this kind. A wooden spiral stair in the western projecting bay appears to be nineteenth-century work, though it may follow the line of an earlier stair in the same position. One doorway at first-floor level in the western gable has been blocked and plastered over, invisible from outside. The eastern chimney stack, which serves the Georgian addition, was likely built or extended at that time to sit above the junction of the two phases, binding them together structurally as well as visually.