The House of Steel is a simple one-story affair, a 21-foot-by-37-foot rectangle atop a concrete slab. Inside are two bedrooms, one bath, and an "open plan" living-dining-kitchen space. Today, a gabled roof covers the original flat roof. There is an attached garage with a rooftop deck.

The house’s construction is unusual, though not unique: It is a frameless building, in which the 4-foot-by-9-foot steel wall panels bear the building’s load. The exterior panels are flanged and bolted together along their vertical edges, through a T-shaped wooden piece. At the bottom, they are bolted to the concrete foundation. The interior wall panels, also steel, are attached to the T-shaped blocks to form a a series of steel "sandwiches." The cavities between the interior and exterior panels are filled with insulation. The roof construction is similar.

The house, which was acquired by Connecticut College in 1949, served as rental housing for faculty and staff members until 2004. That year, in preparation for eventual demolition, the college shuttered the building, ended all maintenance, and removed the building’s mechanical systems.

The House of Steel is a rare surviving example of the low-cost, yet high-quality, "minimum" house meant to address America’ s Depression-era housing crisis, and is a precursor to later efforts at industrialized housing undertaken by Lustron Corp., Walter Gropius’ General Panel Corp., and William J. Levitt, among many others. The building displays numerous innovations in design, materials, and construction methods, and represents the latest thinking, circa 1933, about how to rationalize and modernize both the American home and the homebuilding industry in the United States.