The current building at Burton Park dates from the early nineteenth century, but it sits on the foundations of a much older structure, and those oversized basement walls almost certainly contain the core of the seventeenth-century house that once occupied the site. Two stone-lined tunnels, each roughly a metre high and sixty centimetres wide, have been discovered close to the house, their purpose still unclear. A walled garden to the east goes by the curious name of the bowling green. The castellated entrance gateway to the northwest gives the approach a faintly martial air that the rest of the facade, with its plate-glass sash windows, plaster pediments, and balustraded parapet, does not quite sustain.

The estate came into the possession of the Percival family in the 1630s, and it was Sir John Percival who began work on the original house not long before his death in 1665. The plans were drawn up in his own hand, though the site work was supervised by the architect William Kenn. Percival's death stalled construction for five years; when work resumed it followed a slightly modified version of the original scheme, and the house finally emerged from its scaffolding in the early 1670s. It was a substantial and architecturally ambitious building, described by one scholar as a double pile with a massive row of chimney stacks, a very large staircase, a hall still sub-medieval in form and function, and a long gallery. The wider estate was laid out symmetrically within a system of courtyards, walled gardens, and subsidiary buildings, with six spur-footed defensive turrets, the entire complex measuring 496 feet by 248 feet and covering nearly three acres. That ambition came to nothing in 1689, when the house burnt. Plans for a replacement classical house were drawn up in 1707 but financial difficulties prevented anything being built, and by 1750 a visitor recorded only the walls still standing, remarking that they showed it to have been a large elegant building, mostly of hewn stone. A new two-storey house was eventually raised on the site in the late Georgian period. The Purcell family, who acquired it later, refaced it in Victorian cement and added a high roof with curvilinear dormer-gables, work probably carried out by Matthew Purcell between his birth in 1852 and death in 1904. The house is now occupied by the Ryan-Purcell family, carrying forward, in name at least, a long line of ownership layered into the very fabric of the walls.