The connection is tentative, the building itself largely lost to record, and yet the uncertainty is part of what makes it worth noting. A place does not need to survive intact to leave a trace.

The link between a real building and a fictional one rests on a single bibliographic reference. Writing in 1912, Joyce Weston-St John noted the existence of an old lodge known as Ballyfermot Lodge and suggested it was probably the model for the "Tiles House" that appears in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novel "The House by the Churchyard", first published in 1863. Le Fanu, a Dublin-born writer now best remembered for his supernatural fiction, set much of that novel in and around Chapelizod, the village that sits just downstream along the Liffey from Ballyfermot. "The House by the Churchyard" is a dense, atmospheric work mixing dark comedy, mystery, and Gothic unease, and the Tiles House appears within it as a suitably ominous location. Whether the lodge that stood at Ballyfermot directly inspired the fictional version, or simply shared enough physical resemblance to suggest the connection to a later reader, is impossible to say. The date of the lodge's construction is not recorded.

Because the building's exact location is uncertain and its current state unknown, there is no straightforward visit to be made in the conventional sense. What a visitor to the area can do is walk the broader landscape that Le Fanu drew on, particularly around Chapelizod itself, where the novel's atmosphere is more legible in the streetscape. Anyone with an interest in the literary geography of the novel might find it worth consulting the 1912 reference in Joyce Weston-St John's work directly, since that slim notation is the closest thing to documentary evidence that connects this otherwise undistinguished district to one of the odder productions of nineteenth-century Irish fiction.