The building, known locally as the Tea House, is not so much constructed as it is composed, its doorway and windows lifted wholesale from the ruins of an Augustinian convent and reset into a structure built for leisure rather than devotion. The effect is quietly disorienting: ornate medieval stonework transplanted into an eighteenth or nineteenth-century garden folly, the sacred repurposed for the genteel ritual of afternoon tea.

The nearby convent, known as Monasternagalliaghduff, was an Augustinian nunnery whose standing fabric survived long enough to be plundered for architectural salvage. Writing in 1904, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp documented what a tenant had done to the summer-house: a doorway removed from the western door of the church had been fitted into the structure, along with a tall window from the refectory, since reduced in height, and a third window brought from an uncertain location, possibly the reader's recess, the alcove in a refectory from which a monk or nun would read aloud during communal meals. Westropp noted that the third window had a trefoil head, meaning its upper section was shaped into a three-lobed Gothic arch, while another inserted feature was an ogee-headed light, its arch formed from two S-shaped curves meeting at a point, taken from the residential quarters of the nunnery. The summer-house appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a rectangular structure at the southern end of the formal garden of Old Abbey House, which stands roughly sixty metres to the north.

The Tea House sits in pasture about forty metres west of the nunnery remains and immediately west of a feature recorded as a fish-pond, a detail that gives some sense of the managed, productive landscape this once was. It occupies the south-west corner of what was a walled garden. A Google Earth image from 2015 shows a line of mature trees in the area, which may now obscure the structure considerably. Anyone visiting should expect to navigate farmland and to look carefully; the building is modest in scale and the medieval stonework, if still legible, is embedded in a later shell that gives little away from a distance. A photograph taken by Westropp himself survives and offers the clearest record of how the building appeared in the early twentieth century.