That it survives in any record at all is largely due to the historian F. Elrington Ball, who noted it in his 1903 history of the county of Dublin, though even he could not say precisely where it stood.

Ball's description is spare but telling. The building was constructed for a resident revenue surveyor, an official whose role placed him at the intersection of commerce and Crown administration in early seventeenth-century Dublin. Revenue surveyors in this period were agents of the English administration, responsible for monitoring customs and excise, ensuring that duties were properly collected at a time when Dublin's port trade was expanding and the city itself was beginning to push beyond its medieval boundaries. That such an official warranted a purpose-built house, rather than simply lodging in existing premises, suggests some degree of institutional investment in the work being done. The year 1620 puts the building squarely in the early decades of the plantation era, when Dublin was being reshaped as an administrative and commercial capital.

The honest caveat here is that Ball's note leaves the location unresolved, and nothing in subsequent research appears to have pinned the site down more precisely. There is no address to visit, no plaque to look for, no surviving fabric that can be confidently pointed to. What remains is a single archival reference, the kind of detail that accumulates quietly in county histories and occasionally surfaces to remind us how much of the early modern city has dissolved entirely into later development. For anyone interested in the urban archaeology of Dublin's south city, Ball's 1903 volume is itself worth tracking down; it contains this and many other fragments of a city that has been built and rebuilt many times over.