The present house's earliest period of construction dates to about 1723, when the first floor was built, and it was documented as being occupied by Tomás González y Hernández, an artilleryman at the Castillo de San Marcos, and his family.

[5] The design of this house is one that was adopted by Spanish colonial settlers to deal with local living conditions and available building materials.

It was built of readily available coquina limestone, with its main thick walls oriented east–west, and has an open covered loggia on the east side.

In 1774 the house was purchased by Major Joseph Peavett, an Englishman, who added the wood-frame second story, and put glass windows into openings previously only enclosed by wooden shutters.

The house was taken over by the St. Augustine Historical Society in 1918, which undertook its restoration to a late 19th-century appearance in 1959–60, reversing a number of intervening alterations.