It runs quietly between Kildare Street and Dawson Street in the south city, overshadowed by the Georgian grandeur of nearby Leinster House and the bustle of the streets around it. Yet tucked along its terrace is a house that has been standing since around 1740, surviving the cycles of demolition and redevelopment that have reshaped so much of Dublin's built fabric over the past two and a half centuries.

The architectural historian Maurice Craig, writing in 1969, recorded the house at No. 16 Molesworth Street and dated it to approximately 1740, placing its construction in the early to middle Georgian period, when Dublin was undergoing a significant phase of planned urban expansion. This was the era of the Wide Streets Commissioners and speculative landlord development, when terraces of brick townhouses were being laid out across the south city to accommodate a growing professional and merchant class. A house surviving from this period in something close to its original form is relatively uncommon in central Dublin, where commercial pressures and changing tastes have taken a considerable toll on the eighteenth-century streetscape. Craig's survey remains one of the foundational references for Georgian Dublin, and his noting of this particular property gives it a small but firm foothold in the documentary record.

The street is easily reached on foot from either St Stephen's Green or Trinity College, and No. 16 sits within the main terrace. Visitors with an interest in Georgian architecture will find it worth pausing to look at the proportions of the facade, the relationship between the brick and the window surrounds, and how the building sits within the run of the street. The exterior is the thing here; this is a private address rather than a public attraction, so any examination is necessarily from the pavement. Molesworth Street itself is relatively quiet compared to the surrounding area, which makes it easier to look without the distraction of heavy traffic. Going in the daytime, when the light falls directly onto the front elevation, gives the clearest sense of the building's age and character.