A handsome mid-Georgian house of warm red brick, it was probably built on an older site – mullioned cellar windows and sections of sandstone walls in the service areas suggest an earlier building. The present two-and-a-half storey main block, with a canted, full height bay to the westerly garden side and a south-facing entrance front of five bays, with shouldered surrounds to the centre windows, was built to the designs of John Dovaston of The Nursery, for the Rev. David Pritchard (d. 1794), Rector of Kinnerley, in 1785.

Sadly Pritchard’s finances – and the income from what was then a small property of 130 acres – were insufficient and, on his death, the house remained unfinished. John Dovaston duly commented that the clergy man had built it ‘to his ruin’. The place was sold to Thomas Cureton of Hordley, who died soon after the purchase, and it was thereafter tenanted from 1798 until 1803 when an act was passed enabling the trustees of Cureton’s will to sell the property and to propose the purchase of an estate called The Hurst. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their justification for this was that:

The purchaser, for the sum of £6,350, was the Hon. Thomas Kenyon (1780–1851), second son of the first Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice. Until his death, he and his wife, Louisa Charlotte, the daughter of Rev. J.R. Lloyd of nearby Aston Hall (q.v.), improved the property, gradually acquiring more land until the estate totalled approximately 2,000 acres.