As it stands today, Woodhouse is an uncompromisingly severe Greek Revival house tucked away from curious eyes in a landscape park of great charm. The façades of the house itself – with its Shelvock stone Ionic pilasters and columns framing walls of red brick – conceal the fact that it actually incorporates significant parts of a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century timber-framed house, for which the nomenclature of Woodhouse would have been appropriate. The elements of this earlier building are still to be found in the northern two bays of the present main block, where close studded timber-framed walls and arcaded-headed internal panelling of the earlier house were retained as a part of the lesser, or service elements, of the Georgian house. The differences in floor height of the earlier house section is evident since it cuts across the sash windows of the east front.

This earlier house may have owed its construction, in circa 1582, to Robert Owen, High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1618, who appears to have bought the Woodhouse property from Sir George Young. Owen, was of Welsh ancestry, being descended from Howel Owen of Machynlleth, a common-ancestor also of Judge Owen of Condover (q.v.). Robert’s father, Edward Owen, had been a draper in Shrewsbury where he had built a town house at the glacial-boulder of the Bente Stone, or Bellstone. His town house was built on the profits of the wool trade. His cousin, Richard Owen, was also engaged in the same business and he used his income to build the timber-framed Owen’s Mansion of 1592 on the High Street, the two houses endowing the family with a high status presence in the county town.

Robert Owen married three times and had a total of eighteen children – founding a short-lived junior line at Braggington (q.v.) by his third marriage – which suggests that the seventeenth-century Woodhouse might have been a sizeable mansion.

Woodhouse was inherited by Robert’s son, Edward Owen (b. 1602), and eventually passed to Edward’s eldest surviving son, Robert, who, like his grandfather, was High Sheriff of Shropshire, in his case in 1667. Married to Mary, the daughter of Joshua Eddisbury of Erddig, Denbighshire, the Owens produced four children, of whom the eldest was John (d. 1737).