The 19th-century remodelling of the façade has done a thorough job of obscuring what lies behind it, but a glance upward at the south gable of Maurer's Jewellers reveals something that does not belong to that era at all: a triple-row chimney stack in the Jacobean style, dating to the early 17th century.

The two buildings at 24-26 O'Connell Street, which sit between Quin's Bow and Cook's Lane, were most likely a single dwelling originally, built in the same manner as Cruise's house on nearby Abbey Street, with chimney stacks set into each gable end. Jacobean architecture in Ireland is associated with the period following the Tudor conquest, when English and Continental building fashions began to influence the towns of the Irish midlands and west; the stacked, decorative chimney of this type was a common feature of grander urban houses of that period. Of the three chimney stacks the building once displayed, only the one on the Maurer's gable remains legible. The other two have been cemented over, their detail lost beneath later repairs or alterations.

The survival of even this single stack in a busy town-centre setting is quietly remarkable. Ennis retains a handful of structures from its late medieval and early modern fabric, and this building, however disguised at street level, is part of that layer. The chimney is most easily noticed from the lane side rather than the main street frontage, where the Victorian presentation of the building gives little away.