Its chimney-breasts are massive at ground level and taper by stages as they rise, while the internal walls are mere stud partitions, meaning the great stacks stand entirely independent, unsupported by any substantial masonry. A vaulted passage runs straight through the building from the front door to the rear, and the back elevation is unusually plain, with narrow windows arranged in pairs. Scholars have noted that the overall form and style harks back to the seventeenth century, making the building something of an architectural anachronism for a structure built in 1748.

That date marks its construction as a Charter School, one of a network of Protestant-run institutions established in eighteenth-century Ireland to educate, and convert, the children of the Catholic poor. The land was rented from Sir Charles Moore of Powerstown, though the design may have been conceived even earlier than the build date suggests. When the traveller and bishop Richard Pococke passed through in 1752, he described it as a very neat, well-regulated school accommodating twenty boys and twenty girls, founded on a legacy left by a Mr. Dawson. The school closed in 1823. By 1834, the building had found a new occupant in Charles Bianconi, the Italian-born entrepreneur who had transformed Irish transport with his network of horse-drawn public coaches, and who gave the property its current name. The detached buildings to the rear, which survive as a stable group, are a reminder of just how fitting that association was.