The cottage at 10 Bankside Street is one of Auckland earliest surviving concrete dwellings and a rare surviving example of modest residential housing in the core of the colonial city. Constructed in 1883-1884, the building was erected beside a narrow thoroughfare initially known as Bank Street (later Bankside Street), which was a service lane to Princes Street, one of colonial Auckland's premier addresses. The Princes Street ridge had traditionally been linked to activities connected with the administration of government, justice and military power, but had become increasingly residential by the 1880s. The cottage was erected on the western slope of the ridge, in an area of largely working-class housing extending down to the commercial heartland of Auckland in the Queen Street gully. At the time that the cottage was constructed, Bankside Street contained mostly small timber residences, occupied by a mixture of individuals including a chimney sweep, the manager and washerwoman of the nearby Northern Club, and the caretaker of the Freemasons' Hall, both establishments that fronted onto Princes Street.

As part of the core of initial settlement, the land occupied by the cottage was bought at the first land auction in Auckland, held on 19 April 1841. It was purchased by George Cooper (?-1867), New Zealand's first Collector of Customs, Colonial Treasurer and Acting Colonial Secretary. Cooper's 1492² m (1 rood 19 perches) section was subsequently divided into two lots prior to 1844, with that adjoining Bankside Street further subdivided into three and onsold by settler Charles Goodwin before 1847. The central lot was bought by merchant Henry Keesing (1791-1879), first president of Auckland's Hebrew congregation in nearby Emily Place, who may have erected a timber cottage on the land between 1854 and 1861. Following Keesing's death in 1879, the plot was purchased by Frederick William Wright (1825-1908), a medical practitioner of Parnell, who in turn divided the already tiny holding in half, thereby creating the current 152m² site on which the concrete cottage was built. In October 1883 Wright sold the property for ₤160 to an Irish-born settler John Mulvihill (c.1846-1911) who had recently migrated from Boston, USA, with his wife Mary (c.1858-1924).

Construction of the cottage appears to have occurred shortly before January 1884, when valuation records show Mulvihill as the owner and occupier of a concrete building with a rateable value of ₤18, a considerable increase on the ₤8 charged for the vacant allotment that was in Dr Wright's ownership the year before. Confirmation that the site was previously vacant comes from Vercoe and Harding's 1866 plan of Auckland, and T.W. Hickson's plan of the settlement prepared in 1882. By January 1885, the cottage's rateable value had increased to ₤30, at a time when timber houses in the street were rated at ₤12 to ₤15. Dr Wright has previously been credited with constructing the building, but it may be that the structure was started in 1883 either by Wright or Mulvihill, with further improvements carried out during Mulvihill's ownership in 1884. The dwelling is shown on a plan surveyed in 1887, where it is mistakenly identified as a 'brick cottage'.

Comparatively few concrete structures had previously been erected in Auckland, with rare examples including a crenellated tower for the entrepreneur Josiah Firth (1826-1897) at Clifton House, Epsom in 1871-1873 and the former Congregational Church in Beresford Street in 1874-1876. During the early 1880s, however, the production of hydraulic lime by John Wilson and Company at Mahurangi to the north of Auckland, stimulated the construction of several concrete buildings in the city, including Firths Mill in Queen Street and several small dwellings, such as that erected for John Wilson himself at 63 Ponsonby Road. The new Jewish Synagogue on the corner of Princes Street and Kitchener Road was also built of hydraulic lime concrete in 1884-1885, just a short distance away from the cottage. In contrast, the foundations and walls of the latter are reported as having been made using Portland cement, which may have been imported from England as local cement of this type was not produced by John Wilson and Company until 1884.

The cottage incorporated a hall and four rooms, probably used as a parlour, front bedroom, back bedroom and kitchen. Well into the early twentieth century, night soil would have been collected from an outside toilet. With two children born by 1884, the Mulvihill family had expanded to seven by 1889 with the birth of three more offspring. Although described as a 'settler' in the mid 1880s Mulvihill later took jobs as a labourer, perhaps as a result of the economic depression that took hold late in 1885, shortly after the construction of his residence. Employed by the Auckland City Council, Mulvihill died in 1911 following an industrial accident in which he was overcome by fumes and flames when melting tar. Mary - who appears to have been illiterate - subsequently married labourer George Hannaford in 1916, and lived in the cottage until her death in 1924.

Following Mary's death the cottage was rented out for a decade prior to its sale to Hancock & Co. towards the end of 1938. Hancock, a company with extensive liquor trade interests, used the cottage to accommodate staff from Auckland's premier hotel, The Grand, which had been built in 1889 in Princes Street between the Northern Club and the Freemasons' Hall. Modifications at this time probably included the addition of an attached toilet at the rear of the cottage. In 1966, the cottage was sold and became a student flat, when an additional lean-to bedroom was added.

Following an uncertain period, during which the owner unsuccessfully appealed against the proposed listing of the cottage as a heritage building in the District Plan and was later refused planning consent to demolish, Auckland City Council purchased the building in 1984. This occurred after a campaign by members of the public to save the building. The property was onsold with an encumbrance requiring that the property owner should not allow the cottage to fall into disrepair, or demolish or remove it. The cottage was incorporated into a redevelopment of the wider site in 1988 on which a multi-storey tower block was constructed, at which time the post-1966 lean-to bedroom at the rear of the property was removed. The cottage's subsequent conversion into a pre-school facility involved the insertion of windows and doors in its northern and eastern walls, and additional partitioning in the interior. Further alterations were made in 1996, including the replacement of a corrugated iron roof with shingles. The cottage is currently vacant.

The building remains as one of few workers' cottages surviving in the Auckland CBD, the other notable example being the semi-detached stone cottages at 30-32 Airedale Street dating at least from the early 1860s (NZHPT Registration # 7089, Category I historic place). The oldest extant concrete house in New Zealand is considered to be that built in 1862 by John Gow near Mosgiel.