The name refers not to any individual owner but to a distinctive style of urban domestic architecture characterised by a high, curved or stepped gable facing the street, a form associated in the popular imagination with the followers of William of Orange who settled in Ireland around the turn of the eighteenth century. What made these buildings structurally unusual was their cruciform roof construction, held together by crossed purlins running from gable to gable, an arrangement that allowed for a surprisingly spacious interior despite the narrow street frontages typical of the period.

Maurice Craig, writing in 1982, recorded the former existence of Dutch Billy houses at Poole Street and noted that they dated from around 1700. They were weavers' houses, and that detail places them firmly within the world of the Liberties textile trade, the dense web of silk and wool weaving that made this part of Dublin one of its most industrially active neighbourhoods throughout the eighteenth century. Huguenot refugees, who arrived in Dublin in significant numbers after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, are often credited with bringing advanced weaving techniques to the city, and the Dutch Billy form became associated with their communities. The integrated design of these houses typically placed the loom workshop on an upper floor where large windows could admit maximum light, with the family living beneath.

The houses Craig described at Poole Street no longer survive, which makes this a site defined largely by absence. Poole Street runs through the Liberties, a short walk from the Coombe and Francis Street, and the area retains enough of its historic street pattern to reward a slow walk with some attention to what the building plots and rooflines suggest about earlier phases of construction. Anyone with an interest in vernacular architecture or the social history of the textile trade will find the broader neighbourhood worth exploring carefully, even if the specific structures are gone. Craig's 1982 volume, "The Architecture of Ireland," remains the most useful written guide to understanding what once stood here and why it mattered.