THE RED HOUSE WAS SITUATED ONE AND A HALF MILES FROM THE CENTRE OF IPSWICH on land between the roads leading out of the town to Westerfield and Tuddenham. Its tree-lined entrance drive led northwards from the Tuddenham road. It was the seat of the branch of the Edgar family which traced its descent from William Edgar of Great Glemham.

William Edgar's grandson, Lionel, acquired a newly built messuage and sixty-seven acres of land in the parish of St Margaret's Ipswich in 1641. This purchase was the first in the parish by the Edgar family of which documentary evidence has survived. Over the succeeding two centuries the family acquired additional land in St Margaret's and substantial holdings in villages around Ipswich. Members of the family appear to have had a propensity for marrying heiresses, a fact that may account for the extent of the property they acquired.

Lionel Edgar's grandson Thomas, who died in 1692, was Recorder of Ipswich and Reader of Gray's Inn. His son, also Thomas, died in 1677, having married Agatha, heiress of Borodaile Mileson of Norton, the name Mileson being thereafter used as a Christian name in succeeding generations of the family. Thomas and Agatha Edgar's son, Mileson, is the first described as being ‘of Red House Park’, although the house was almost certainly built before his time.

The estate then passed in the direct line through two Mileson Edgars to Reverend Mileson Gery Edgar, who died childless in 1853, leaving the property to his widow, Elizabeth. She outlived her husband by thirtyseven years, dying in 1890.

THE RED HOUSE's central block (to which wings were added at a later date) is thought to have been built in 1658, although some sources have attributed it to the early eighteenth century. Although no archaeological evidence of activity on the site prior to the eighteenth century has been found, the 1937 sale particulars stated that the hall contained ‘a Jacobean Oak Staircase … with twisted and carved balusters and tread spandrels’. Moreover Thomas Edgar is recorded in 1674 as having a house with thirteen hearths in St Margaret's Parish, and the evidence therefore points to the house being of mid-seventeenth-century rather than eighteenth-century date.

The house’s central block was of five bays with the outer bays projecting forward. It had three storeys (with a semi-basement containing the domestic offices) with string courses, a plain parapet and plaintile roofs.