This is the spectacular creation of the Ripleys, a Yorkshire family who acquired the property and set about building a new mansion to the designs of Thomas Harris (1829–1900). Harris, who made a name as an architectural theorist through his book The Periods of English Architecture (1894) worked on only a few mansions, all erected for clients with fortunes derived from manufacturing rather than ancient family wealth. His Yorkshire mansion, Milner Field (1873–7) for Sir Titus Salt junior, was demolished in the twentieth century, whilst Shropshire still retains his other two important works in the form of Stokesay Court (1889) and Bedstone (1884). That Harris came to design Bedstone was almost certainly due to his clients knowing the Salt family; both were in trade in Bradford, and both families attended the Horton Lane Congregational Chapel.

The Ripley family wealth derived from cloth dyeing. George Ripley (1759–1826) moved from Halifax to Bradford after an earlier woad-dying business failed due to a rogue partner. The business that he established in 1812 with his wife’s cousin, James Walton, at Bowling, near Bradford, paved the way for what, in 1820, became George Ripley & Sons. His son, Edward Ripley (1790–1866), took on and developed the business in his own name, marrying Hannah Murgatroyd which created an alliance with another successful Bradford business family. Their son, Henry William Ripley (1813–1882), took the business to its pinnacle of success, through an interest in developing new colours and what became known as the ‘melange patent’. The family’s works were rebuilt and became a large industrial concern, with a model village for workers, known as ‘Ripleyville’, created in 1863–4, whilst the family contributed to educational institutes and paid for the building of St Bartholomew’s Church and the Rawdon Convalescent Home.

Henry Ripley, meanwhile, had married Susan Milligan in 1836 and this, following Mrs Ripley’s adopted-father’s death in 1862, ultimately brought the family a grand Yorkshire house with the distinctly suburban name of Acacia. Ripley entered politics, as Liberal MP for Bradford in 1868–9 and in 1874–80, but towards the end of his second tenure, he decided to establish the family with a country seat in Shropshire and made the purchase of the Bedstone estate in 1879.