The present house at Tunstall stands proudly in parkland, looking from its eminence, to the east, across the valley of the River Tern. What one sees today is essentially early-Georgian and, for the most part, the creation of William Church. His ancestor and namesake, a Nantwich mercer, had acquired Tunstall and neighbouring Betton (q.v.) in 1611 and 1608 respectively, the properties having followed the same paths of ownership since the dissolution of Shrewsbury Abbey in the sixteenth century. Richard, the younger son of the William Church of the seventeenth-century, was described as ‘of Tunstall’ in 1623, although the main seat of the family appears to have been Betton until the early eighteenth century.

The builder of the present house, William Church (1679–1743) married Mary Aston in 1703. She was the daughter of Edward Aston – said to be of a younger branch of the Barons Aston of Tixall in Staffordshire – and Mary certainly came into the marriage with lands in Shropshire and Staffordshire. William Church served as Sheriff of Shropshire in 1715. The house that they built in circa 1732 is a curious piece of architecture, with its distinctly urban west entrance front. Of nine bays and two-and-a-half storeys, this is of brick with painted stone dressings and a parapet which hides the slated roof. The ground floor is enlivened in having pediments over each of the shouldered window surrounds and a segmental pediment over the central door. One might have expected this treatment at the next level – as for a piano nobile – yet the first floor of the house, raised above double string courses, has a row of windows with stone surrounds and plain entablatures and, above, the second floor with plain moulded surrounds. This treatment is a particularly eccentric, provincial rendering of the Palladian style. It was probably originally intended to create a highly-architectural set piece façade at the head of a formal entrance courtyard – the latter having since been lost to late eighteenth-or early nineteenth-century parkland landscaping.

The garden front, Janus-like, presents a much simpler ensemble, with moulded keystones above each window and the central ground-floor door distinguished with a pediment and heavy rusticated Gibbs surround.