The site comprises some 7 properties, mostly on the northern side of Marie-Victorin Road (French: Route Marie-Victorin; Quebec Route 132), with one on the merging Pioneers Street (French: rue des Pionniers), and is located west of the original village core of Saint-Nicolas (Saint-Nicolas was merged to Lévis in 2002).
[2] The house is built using pièce-sur-pièce techniques where notched logs are piled horizontally, and covered with vertical wood sidings, with low foundations (compared with buildings of the 19th century and later) and a tall roof.
[3][4] During the 19th century, the Pâquet House received many alterations to bring it more in line with the English-introduced styles that strongly influenced Quebec vernacular architecture; almost all these modifications were reverted when the building was thoroughly renovated in late 1880s.
The chapel, built in 1867–68, lacks a separate civic number (it is part of the Pâquet House lot), whereas the adjoining Hermitage, now a private residence, is #1631.
All openings are ogive-shaped, and most wooden surfaces, such as those of the large square front porch, are elaborately carved.
The inside decoration is equally elaborate, with fake wooden rib vault, glass- and plasterwork (the latter is frequent in Quebec 19th century religious architecture).
[2][5] The other buildings within the site, although typical examples of 18th- and 19th-century vernacular cottages in their own right, are of limited historical interest beyond their overall link to the Pâquet estate.
The main building has three front dormers; the summer kitchen is a smaller-scale version of the corps de logis.
One of the dependencies, a small square building dubbed the "Noviciate" (French: Noviciat), was converted to a chalet and moved to an adjacent plot.
Its front porch cover is also independent from the curved, sheet-metal roof, and has decorative angle braces (though they are less elaborate).
Its main peculiarities are the slight asymmetry in the placement of the façade openings (the door is distinctly closer to the windows on the right side), and the decoration of their frames, which are painted the same dark green as the shutters of the Pâquet house.
The exact series of owner is not entirely clear, but by the late 19th century, it was the property of Étienne-Théodore Pâquet (father of the MLA).
A few years later the Pâquet House and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Chapel were classified as historic monuments, and subsequently restored to their better times.
Primarily this involved removing various Regency-inspired alterations to the Pâquet House[2] as well as moving the chapel and rebuilding its elaborate porch, which was dismantled in the 1850s during widening work on Quebec Route 132.