It was substantial enough to be labelled on a map, gabled, and belonging to someone recorded only as Mr Suroge. Today there is no trace of it above ground, which makes its appearance on a historical survey all the more quietly arresting.

The evidence for the building comes from the Down Survey, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project directed by William Petty, which aimed to document landholding across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars. The Down Survey, so called because its measurements were set down, or "laid down", on paper rather than merely estimated, produced parish-level maps of considerable detail for its era. A composite version held in the National Library of Ireland overlays those 1657 maps onto later Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets, allowing direct comparison between what stood then and what came after. On that composite, the entry reads "Mr Suroge's House", with a depiction of a large gabled structure in the south-eastern sector of what is now the Botanic Gardens, adjacent to Botanic Road. The set of 42 parish maps for County Dublin was copied by a Daniel O'Brien in 1786 to 1787, meaning the document itself is an eighteenth-century transcription of a seventeenth-century survey, adding another layer of remove between the original observation and the surviving record.

The gardens are freely accessible and the south-eastern boundary, where Botanic Road runs alongside the perimeter wall, is easy enough to walk. The gate lodge in that sector sits close to where Mr Suroge's house is thought to have stood, though nothing marks the spot and the lodge itself is a product of a much later era. Visitors curious about the site can consult the original NLI record online. The composite Down Survey maps for County Dublin are catalogued at sources.nli.ie, where the accompanying terriers, the written descriptions that accompanied the maps, can also be examined alongside the cartographic evidence.