What makes it genuinely unusual is what survived the rebuilding. Tucked inside, the woodwork in the boudoir and the bedroom directly above it has been identified as among the very few remaining seventeenth-century interiors anywhere in Ireland, a category so rare that individual examples are worth noting by name.

The house occupies a site with a longer and more turbulent history than its current fabric suggests. In the sixteenth century it was associated with the Blackeney family, and later passed into the hands of the Plunkets, whose connection to it falls during the 1641 Rebellion, a period of widespread conflict across Ireland that left few landed families untouched. The present structure was rebuilt around 1740, according to Peck, essentially replacing whatever had stood before. Yet not everything was swept away. The wooden staircase at the back of the hall, with its distinctive pear-shaped balusters, has been dated by comparison with Leixlip Castle to the late seventeenth century, suggesting it predates the Georgian rebuild and was retained when the rest of the house was remodelled. Bence-Jones, who documented Irish country houses extensively, is the source for the assessment of the boudoir woodwork and its significance.

The house is reached by an ornamental avenue leading off the Rathbeale road, which gives some sense of the formal approach that would have accompanied a property of this standing. It is a Protected Structure, listed as no. 338, which means changes to its character are subject to planning controls. Visitors interested in early Irish domestic interiors should be aware that access to the interior is not a given at a privately held property of this kind, and the real draw here, the seventeenth-century woodwork, is not visible from the outside. The staircase and the boudoir panelling are the details to look for if access is ever possible; they represent a layer of the house that the eighteenth-century reconstruction did not entirely erase.