The site sat partially over the remains of the medieval Carmelite Priory, meaning that from the outset this modest meeting house was layered onto an older religious landscape. It is the kind of overlap that Dublin's streets tend to conceal without ceremony.

John Wesley himself secured a ninety-year lease on the Whitefriar Street site, and the building he established was practical rather than grand. A square structure with an internal porch, a gallery running along three sides, and backless benches for the congregation, it had little of the ornamentation associated with established church architecture. Above the chapel sat a hall of equal dimensions, divided by moveable partitions into rooms that could serve as living quarters for travelling preachers or be opened up for meetings of varying sizes. This flexibility was characteristic of early Methodist organisation, which relied on itinerant ministry rather than fixed clergy. The building appears on John Rocque's celebrated 1756 map of Dublin, annotated simply as 'M.H.', a small square on the southern edge of White Friar Lane. When the lease eventually expired and was not renewed to the Methodist community, the Carmelite Order acquired the property. By 1891, the Irish Builder noted that the Fathers of the Carmelite Order had purchased the old meeting house and converted it into a school-house, adding that at the rear of the building lay the ancient cemetery of the Carmelite community, a detail that draws the site's long pre-Methodist history back into view.

Whitefriar Street in Dublin's south city is well known today for the Carmelite church that operates there, but the layered history beneath and around it rewards closer attention. Rocque's 1756 map, available through UCD Library's digital collections, allows anyone to locate the original footprint of the meeting house and trace how the street has shifted around it. The 1847 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows what was by then recorded as Whitefriar's Hall, offering a further point of comparison for those interested in how the building's use and name evolved across a century of changing ownership.