Compare and contrast

Two grand country houses-one a Georgian gem, the other built to look like one-highlight our enduring love of 18th-century architecture

- Penny Churchill

SET in the heart of unspoilt Shropshire countryside, four miles from Oswestry and 22 miles from Shrewsbury, Grade IIlisted Woodhill Park is described by the agents as ‘a glorious Georgian house standing in the privacy of a magnificent park and woodland estate’. For sale for the first time since 1987 at a guide price of £4.5 million, the ringfenced 156-acre estate has remained largely intact since the mellow red-brick house was first built in the early-to-mid 18th century.

Although altered and extended in Victorian times, the house remains true to its origins, having the beautifully balanced, well-lit rooms and fine decorative detail that are the hallmarks of the Georgian era. The estate itself comprises mostly wooded parkland, with a range of cottages and barns suitable for conversion to a variety of uses. According to Historic England, the park was laid out in 1806–07 and later extended. Woodhill Park, better known as Woodhill, is said to have been built for Richard Jones, whose daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, married Lazarus Venables, scion of a prominent Welsh landowning family, in 1771. Venables greatly extended the house, moving the entrance front to its present position and altering the course of the road southwards away from the house. Their son, Lazarus Jones Venables, made further alterations to the house and acquired more land. In doing so, he appears to have overspent and Woodhill was offered for sale in 1852.