It faces south, overlooking the Thames valley and is surrounded by open country. It has Thorndon Golf Club before it, the Municipal Golf Club behind it and the northern and southern halves of the Thorndon Country Park on each side.

It was designed by James Paine, a famous architect, and it is a magnificent Palladian mansion which has no equal in Essex.
Its building was started in 1770 and completed in 1776. It was the home of the Petre family and was built by the ninth Lord Petre, who employed a man called Capability Brown to lay out the park and gardens for a fee of £5,000.

The present hall consists of a large central building, with a central courtyard, connected to smaller east and west pavilions and it is flanked by two sets of cottages, the sites of which were formerly occupied by domestic buildings, such as coach houses, tack room, bakery, brewery, laundry et cetera.

The West Pavilion was occupied by stables and groom's quarters and was the source of a disastrous fire, which unfortunately destroyed both it and part of the main house in the year 1878. The East Pavilion was left intact however and this and the eastern end of the main building continued to be occupied by the Petre family until 1919, when they leased the whole property to the Thorndon Golf Club and moved their residence back to the original family seat, Ingatestone Hall, which was and is still in their possession.

A builder called Thomas Bates bought the ruined house and grounds in about 1978 and rebuilt it all as attractive apartments and cottages. The cottages are grouped around two pretty courtyards.

The main building contains 37 flats surrounding an open courtyard. The East pavilion contains 16 flats and the west one contains 12 flats.

When the house was first built, the Petre family had their main salons and reception rooms on the first floor, which could be reached from the outside via a stairway at each end of the building. These stairways have long since disappeared and have not been replaced, as they would not be consistent with the present design.