Abbey House contains part of the precinct of the fomer Cistercian Abbey of Buildwas but is now in private hands. The cloister, it will be remembered, stand on the N side of the abbey church, and Abbey house is to the N of the cloister square. It contains a continuation of the W claustral range, formerly the Day Room which was vaulted and open towrds the E via a 3-bay arcade. E of the arcade was, to the N an open court with the infirmary on its N side, the Abbot's Lodgings on the E, and apparantly a chapel at the S end of the E range, extending westwards to partly close the court. The dwelling now called Abbey House occupies the former Abbot's Lodging.

The dominant Romanesque feature here is the 3-bay arcade at the W of the site, but there are also several interesting carved stones reset around the chapel and the Abbot's Lodging.

The Abbey was dissolved in 1536, and in the following year the site was granted to Sir Edward Grey, Lord Powis, who settled the estate on his illegitimate son, also named Edward. He converted the buildings to the NE of the cloister into a grand residence, which was to be sold to Sir William Acton, along with the entire Buildwas estate, in 1648. It passed to Walter Moseley later in the century and remained in that family into the 20thc. In 1925 the now dilapidated buildings were placed in the guardianship of the Office of Works. The house remained in private ownership, while the church and cloister areas passed to the care of English Heritage in 1984.

The recent paper by Robinson and Harrison provides a reliable up-to-date analysis of the relation between the parts of the abbey now forming Abbey House and what remains in the care of English Heritage. For the material discussed here they suggest that the long building on the S side of the court, represented by the gable scar on the east face of the S bay of the arcade, and the roofed chapel containing the piscina or ambry in the S wall further east was the earliest of the buildings. One possibility, suggested by its orientation is that the east end was an early church built for the Savignac convent in the 1130s or '40s. Another is that it was an early Cistercian infirmary with its chapel at the E end, but as the authors point out, neither is entirely convincing. Robinson and Harrison relate the sculpture of the foliate tympanum to work by the Dymock school of sculpture, especially the fonts at Newnham-on-Severn and Rendcombe (Gloucs), and the chancel arch capitals at Bridstow (Herefs). It should also be added that Newnham also holds a fragment of a similar Tree-of-Life tympanum. These sculptural comparisons suggest a date in the second quarter of the 12thc., whereas as Robinson and Harrison point out it seem unlikely that the work to the north of the cloister would predate that of the E claustral range, ie. it should be no earlier than 1160-70.