Tone Dale House

In 1772, Thomas Fox (1747–1821), the son of Edward Fox and Anna Were, became a partner in the family's long-established Fox Brothers textile manufacturing business in Wellington, Somerset. He became the sole proprietor in 1796 and changed the company's name. Their main production sites were Tonedale Mills and Tone Works in Wellington and Coldharbour Mill Working Wool Museum, Uffculme, Devon. "It was the practice...for many well-to-do manufacturers and merchants to build fine houses in the country, becoming country gentlemen themselves, their ladies priding themselves on their idleness." Thomas Fox and his wife Sarah, however, built their Palladian Villa house in 1801 or 1807 beside their…

Tone Dale House is set in 4 acre of gardens on the Devon and Somerset borders, 2 mi from junction 26 of the M5 motorway. "Tone Dale House is a long, low, well-proportioned house, yellow plastered building built in the style of a Palladian Villa. The house faces south; with windows looking out across the gardens to a distant view of the Blackdown Hills, the mill stream flowing slowly by, until it disappears into the shrubbery, where it cascades over the weir." The garden, which is mostly laid to lawn, includes an old tennis house and a two-hundred-year-old Cork Oak tree; all bordered by a ten-foot sandstone wall and the mill stream. The gardens (like Wellington Park) were designed by Robert…

Today the 16-bedroom Tone Dale House is owned by Ben Fox (former Sales & Marketing Director at Fox Brothers) and Victoria Fox. It is run by the Big House Co and can be hired for celebrations, anniversaries, weddings, parties, holidays, reunions or corporate events. Ben is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Fox.