Condover Hall is perfectly framed by the handsome red sandstone gateway that greets travellers on the road south from the village, appearing as a perfectly contrived set-piece. The view, which seems to assert the house’s architectural credentials with confidence is, in fact a nineteenth-century construct. The arch itself is of early nineteenth-century date and indeed the house, as it stands today was heavily restored in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Condover’s basic form and structure, though, remains the house that was built for the lawyer and judge Thomas Owen and completed for his son Roger Owen. It is on an H-plan, the open sides of the shape being the easterly entrance and westerly garden fronts, the former with a central projecting porch tower. The shaped cresting of the porch tower, high above the arched portal embraced by Ionic columns, is flanked by a pair of large gables, with further gables on the outer wings, each decorated with concentric circular motifs at their apex. At the centres of the north and south fronts rise big square towers, the upper storeys of which might have served as banqueting belvederes above the mansion.

On the west side of the house, the space between the two projecting wings is occupied by an arcade of nine arches, now glazed but which were originally an open loggia, with a mezzanine lit by tripartite pedimented windows above. It is a feature which is also known to have been a part of the house at High Ercall (q.v.), another Shropshire house where the mason, Walter Hancock, is known to have worked. Hancock has been credited with the design of Condover, and was certainly working there as mason, as the bailiff’s building accounts show. He had superseded John Richmond, with whom a contract had been drawn up in 1588–9, but this had not been carried through and Hancock was certainly at the helm by November 1591. Lawrence Shipway, a mason in charge of the building of the Shire Hall at Stafford, also played a part in overseeing ‘to sett forward the work’. The most intriguing discovery connected with the building of Condover, however, is Mark Girouard’s identification of the house’s ground and upper floor plans in the drawing book of John Thorpe (1565–1655) at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, which credibly raises the prospect that Thorpe designed Condover.