A single house is one room wide, with the narrow end towards the street, the better to catch cool breezes.

[2][3] The house is set on a narrow lot on the west side of Church Street in Old Charleston.

It was acquired in the 1730s or 1740s by Miles Brewton, who had immigrated from Barbados to Charleston in 1684, where he became a goldsmith and militia officer.

[4] He gave the house to his son Robert Brewton, also a goldsmith and then married to his second wife, Mary Griffith.

It is a double house in the Palladian style, with an intact complex of support buildings on its two-acre lot.