The name on the gate reads Morristown Lattin, but the house itself tells a more complicated story than any single spelling can convey. What visitors encounter near the southern bank of a broad bend in the River Liffey is a building that has been added to, remodelled, partially gutted by fire, and yet has somehow remained substantially intact, its Jacobean-style chimneys still rising above a roofline that has been raised and re-raised over three centuries.

The Lattin family built the original house in 1692. It was a two-storey structure with a dormered attic, and its south-east-facing front had a deep, one-bay projection at each end, giving it a measured, composed symmetry typical of late seventeenth-century Irish domestic architecture. By the early nineteenth century, a four-storey tower had already been grafted on, and in 1825 the architect W. D. Butler was brought in to carry out a more thoroughgoing transformation. Butler worked in the Tudor Revival idiom, a style fashionable in Ireland at the time that drew on late medieval English architecture, particularly its asymmetrical massing, pointed gables, and decorative stonework. He added a new front, built a further tower at the north-east end, and raised the roof again. The fire that damaged the building in the early 1980s might have been the end of it, but the underlying fabric of the 1692 house survived, and those original chimneys remain a direct physical trace of the Lattin family's first construction.

The house sits at the end of a long approach drive, with the River Liffey curving broadly behind it to the south. That combination of layered architecture and riverside setting gives the place an air of accumulation rather than design, as if each generation simply added what it needed and left the evidence in plain sight.