Although Nikolaus Pevsner previously stated that Clephan was a French architect who designed the present house instead of De Grey the amateur architect, as Charles Read has shown in his biography of De Grey, Clephan (born Clapham) in fact only produced drawings of the service infrastructure, such as plumbing and drainage.

Nan Ino Cooper ran Wrest Park as a military hospital during World War I, although a fire in September 1916 halted this usage of the house.

[6] Wrest Park has an early eighteenth-century garden, spread over 92 acres (37 ha),[7] which was probably originally laid out by George London and Henry Wise for Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent, then modified for his granddaughter Jemima, 2nd Marchioness Grey by Lancelot "Capability" Brown in a more informal landscape style.

The park is divided by a wide gravel central walk, continued as a long canal that leads to a Baroque pavilion banqueting house designed by Thomas Archer and completed in 1711.

[12] A Wellingtonia planted in 1856 was in its earlier years brought into the house annually to serve as a Christmas tree, one of the earliest surviving examples known in the U.K.[13] In the autumn of 2007 English Heritage announced that the Wolfson Foundation had pledged up to £400,000 towards the restoration of a number of the key features of the Wrest Park estate, including the mansion's formal entrance area, the garden statuary, railings and gates, and to alter the height of the carriage drive.

On 12 September 2008 English Heritage unveiled extensive plans to restore the Grade-I-listed Wrest Park house and gardens to their original splendour.

[5] English Heritage and Historic England have undertaken a number of indepth investigations of the gardens at Wrest as part of the restoration process, including archaeological[16] and geophysical surveys.

The column has the inscription: "These gardens, originally laid out by Henry Duke of Kent, were altered by Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke and Jemima Campbell, 2nd Marchioness Grey with the professional assistance of Lancelot Brown Esq.