In medieval times the home of an eponymous family, Chyknell passed by inheritance through the female line to the Taylor and Farmer families. The present house was a rebuilding of an earlier construction of which the stables, dated 1792, remain. The client was Farmer Taylor who apparently consulted several local architects. A plan and elevation at the house, possibly by Joseph Bromfield, shows a scheme for retaining the old house as service accommodation, with a new six-bay east front of similar pretensions to Bromfield’s Berrington Hall, Shropshire, which contained new reception rooms and a large imperial plan staircase. Another unsigned plan was for a house heavily influenced by Nash’s Cronkhill (q.v.) with a weak trellis colonnade, which – albeit unexecuted – dictated the rustic Italianate style of the present house.

The successful architect was John Hiram Haycock, whose plans are dated 1814, and the resultant house has a colour-washed north-facing entrance front, with low pitched roof, broad eaves and one bay pedimented projections embracing a single-storey Greek Doric colonnade with antefixae on the parapet. This front is a virtual copy of the entrance front of Coedarhydyglyn, West Glamorgan, a house also associated with the Haycocks. As at Coedarhydyglyn, the western-most pedimented bay of Chyknell’s north-facing entrance front – although externally appearing to be of two storeys – is, in fact, three storeys. It forms a part of the mansion’s offices which continue south of this front, concealed behind a single storey detached colonnade of Greek Doric columns, which have a splendidly theatrical effect. Within, Haycock gave the house an iron trellis balustraded, cantilevered stone staircase which rises to the first floor beyond a screen of Ionic columns in the entrance hall.

Farmer Taylor, who was Sheriff in 1815, had married Juliana, daughter of 2nd Lord Waterpark, and their son Henry Cavendish Cavendish, assumed his mother’s surname. It was for Henry Cavendish, in the year after his succession, that Edward Haycock added a lofty dining room to the house in 1858.