The architects convinced their clients to buy the home by calling it ?the ultimate antique? What is the appeal of old buildings" It?s more than the patina of age or the level of craftsmanship. It?s certainly not convenience. For the owners and designers of the Creamery?a breathtaking conversion from ramshackle dairy barn into contemporary retreat?the lure was part story, part connection, and part design.

The original structure was built in the 1800s by unnamed Scottish stonemasons who constructed rock walls measuring two feet thick. But after more than a century of use and then decades of abandonment, the stone dairy was practically a ruin when architects at JLF Design Build found the building and encouraged their clients to purchase it, calling the home ?the ultimate antique.?
The dairy?s materials were transported to a site just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and painstakingly rebuilt with a few modern tweaks like enormous pressed-steel windows and a glass hallway connecting the main house to a guest wing. The master bedroom is a particularly artful combination of old and new?with huge panes of glass mixing with the rugged texture of aged stone and reclaimed wooden trusses and floors.

?The relic itself inspired a sense of responsibility to its origins,? JLF Design Build principal Paul Bertelli told Inhabitat. ?This building in its existing form, with its scale and proportion, was much purer than...