Harnage Grange is a complex house which has been much altered, now standing as a quadrangle, with an open north-west side. The west and east ranges, together with sections of the remaining north wing, are largely built of sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, and appear to be survivors of the medieval grange. To this, additions have been made in brick that date, partly, from the late sixteenth century – when the Grange became the seat of the Fowler family – and partly from 1878 when a Georgian block was demolished. There are also works post 1933, when the house gained much of its current form following its sale to Colonel G.P. Pollitt.

Harnage had been a Grange of Buildwas Abbey from 1232, having been given to the monastery by Gilbert de Lacy. In 1533 the property had been leased for sixty years to Sir Richard Brereton, whilst the property itself was granted, following the Dissolution along with the other Buildwas properties to Edward, 3rd Baron Grey of Powis. It passed, in 1560, to his illegitimate son Edward Grey.

Nine years later, Harnage was sold to William Fowler (d. 1598) who seems to have already been living at Harnage, having acquired the Brereton lease prior to 1565. Fowler’s family had hailed from Foxley in Buckinghamshire, although his father, Roger Fowler, was of Broomhill, Staffordshire.

Either William Fowler or his son, Richard (d. 1622), undertook a rebuilding of the house to transform it into a fashionable seat. Their work comprised much of the south and east wings, of which perhaps the most notable survivals are the brick crow-stepped, gabled chimney stack at the eastern end of the south front and the crow-stepped gable that stands on the return, on the east front. A two storey gazebo, at the side of the walled garden to the east, with a conjoined octagon and rectangle plan was also evidently a part of this work, suggesting a sophisticated contemporary garden layout. With conical roof and, again, a crowstepped gable, it is an immensely ambitious structure and suggests that the house, in its original sixteenthcentury form, would have been internally decorated to a high standard. The crow-stepped gables, indeed, recall the work at Tong Castle (q.v.), then being undertaken for Sir Henry Vernon.