Commissioned by Augusta Waddington, and her husband Benjamin Hall, later Baron Llanover, the house was designed by Thomas Hopper and was largely complete by 1837.

On the wider Ty Uchaf estate, which Lady Llanover had inherited from her father, the Halls created a model estate village, with housing for their workers, chapels, schools, police and fire services, and temperance public houses, as Lady Llanover was also a champion of abstinence.

Joshua Waddington (1711-1780), who was born in Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire[1] bought Tŷ Uchaf, an 'ill-built, incomplete, & inelegant dwelling house' [2] in Monmouthshire, where he laid out an extensive park.

[7][a] The Halls devoted considerable attention to the development of Llanover as a model estate village, although John Newman, in his Gwent/Monmouthshire volume of the Pevsner Buildings of Wales, notes that much of the current building estate dated from the time of their grandson, Ivor Herbert, 1st Baron Treowen.

[3] In addition to the construction of cottages for the estate workers, schools for their children, and chapels for them all to worship in, Lady Llanover established a number of temperance inns, as a firm advocate of abstinence.

[7][15] LLanover House was built in a Jacobethan style, with three main storeys and grouped sets of chimney stacks.