The structure dates from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when the streets south of the Liffey were being laid out and built up with the confidence of a city that briefly imagined itself a European capital.

The link here is to the La Touche Bank, which Maurice Craig, writing in his 1969 study of Dublin's architecture, places in this part of the city and dates to 1735. The La Touche family were Huguenot merchants, part of that wave of Protestant refugees who left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in Ireland, where many rose to considerable commercial prominence. Their bank became one of the most important financial institutions in eighteenth-century Dublin, handling the accounts of landed families and serving as a node in the credit networks that underpinned Irish commercial life before the establishment of more formal banking structures. A building associated with that institution carries with it the whole texture of a mercantile city operating at the edge of its ambitions.

The building sits within the south city area, though visitors approaching without a precise address should be prepared for the ordinary work of urban archaeology, reading streetscapes carefully and checking Craig's volume for orientation. The fabric of this part of Dublin rewards slow walking rather than purposeful marching; details that read as background noise at speed become legible once you slow down. If the structure retains original fenestration or decorative stonework, those elements are worth examining closely, since eighteenth-century Dublin builders worked within a fairly consistent Georgian idiom, brick fronts, regular sash windows, restrained ornament, that can look almost interchangeable until you start noticing the small variations in proportion and craft between one building and the next.