A country house for sale that's had a century and a half of blood, sweat and tears poured into it

In 1851, an entry in the Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire recorded the hamlet of Little Onn, comprising 870 acres of land, 1½ miles south of Church Eaton and eight miles south-west of Stafford, as being ‘the sole property of Charles Ashton Esq, who has a pleasant seat here called Rye Hill House’. Now, after more than a century and a half of restoration, the present main house there, set in 28 acres, is for sale through the Midlands office of Fisher German and Peter James Property in Wolverhampton, at a guide price of £3.5 million.

Ashton inherited the estate when still a minor, following the death in 1844 of his father, whose family had made their fortune in the cotton mills of the North-West. His grandfather, James Ashton, had bought the Little Onn estate with its late-18th-century house from the Crockett family in 1830, the year that Charles was born.

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Ashton was clearly unimpressed by Rye Hill House; no sooner had he come of age than he set about replacing it with the much grander Little Onn Hall, built in the style of an Elizabethan manor house with tall chimneystacks and crow-stepped gables.

A medieval moated site to the north-east of the hall, which includes the remains of a building thought to be part of the original 15th-/16th-century manor house, is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, although the hall itself is unlisted.

After his death in 1891, and that of his wife two years later, Little Onn Hall passed to their teenage daughters, Eveline and Amy, who embarked on ambitious plans for improving the house and grounds, as a result of which the building almost doubled in size.

In the 1890s, the sisters commissioned Thomas Mawson, one of the leading garden designers of his day, to produce a detailed plan for landscaping the gardens.

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However, his proposals were never fully implemented, as his clients ran out of money, although they still managed to execute enough of Mawson’s designs to make the gardens at Little Onn Hall among the best surviving examples of his work.

The Ashton sisters both married in the early 1900s and, in 1907, Little Onn Hall was sold to Tyrell William Cavendish, who died in the RMS Titanic disaster in 1912. The property was sold twice more in the 20th century before being acquired in 2006 by its current owner, a successful Midlands businessman, with whom Little Onn Hall has undergone what Stuart Flint of Fisher German describes as ‘the perfect restoration’.

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The house now offers more than 10,500sq ft of pristine living space on three main floors, including five principal reception rooms, a garden room, study, cinema, office, kitchen/breakfast room and domestic offices on the ground floor, with cellars below.

Upstairs, the sumptuous principal bedroom suite boasts a striking stone fireplace, two beautifully fitted dressing rooms and luxurious his-and-her shower rooms; there are nine further bedrooms and four further bath/shower rooms.

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Highlights of the interior include the central oak-panelled library, off which radiate the principal reception rooms, and the kitchen/breakfast room, previously a grand billiards room, with its dramatic arched ceilings rising to a vast glazed roof lantern.

The same meticulous attention to detail is evident throughout the gardens and grounds, notably the pleasure gardens laid out by Mawson and completed in about 1898. His design includes terraces, a tennis court, a rose garden and woodland, with much additional planting carried out by the current owners.

Little Onn is for sale through Fisher German and Peter James Property at a guide price of £3.5 million.