That hall alone signals something deliberate and considered about the original design, the kind of spatial thinking that belonged to a particular school of architectural ambition in early eighteenth-century Ireland.

Rose Hill is associated with Sir Edward Lovett Pearse, who lived from 1699 to 1733, or with architects working in his tradition. Pearse is best remembered as the designer of the original Irish Parliament House on College Green in Dublin, now the Bank of Ireland, and he was the leading Irish exponent of Palladianism, the style derived from the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, which prized symmetry, classical proportion, and carefully ordered facades. The house at Finglas carries several hallmarks of that approach: beyond the octagonal hall, there is a bowed staircase and a pair of lunette windows, the small semicircular windows set beneath the roof gable that were a favoured ornamental detail of the Palladian manner. The Finglas Environmental Heritage Project documented these features in 1991, noting their close relationship to the design vocabulary Pearse and his circle brought to Irish domestic architecture.

Rose Hill sits in an area of Finglas that retains traces of its pre-suburban character, though the surroundings have changed considerably since the house was built. Visitors approaching from the village will find the building in a residential context rather than a country setting. The lunette windows are most legible from outside when the light is not too flat, and the octagonal hall is the detail most worth seeking out if access is possible, since it gives a clearer sense of the Palladian interior logic than the exterior alone can convey.