In two short years, a private Montana ranch, with a gushing trout stream cutting through it, was transformed into the Ranch at Rock Creek-a luxury guest ranch with 29 rooms, set on 10 square miles of rolling hills and hay meadows.

Though elk and mountain cats roam the ranchland, the project was not without a few design challenges. Among them, “making the new buildings work with the old ones,” notes Jet Zarkadas, owner of Los Griegos Studio, the Santa Fe-based firm that worked on the fast-track project. “We wanted to maintain the old ranch feeling. We used reclaimed lumber and beams to give it a cohesiveness. Everything was distressed, stained, and worked to look like the older wood.” Thus, historic buildings like a 19th-century barn (it was reconstituted as the Loft, a one-bedroom suite with a marble-tiled bathroom) and newly built canvas cabins or tents, outfitted with plush log-frame beds and gas stoves, happily coexist.

While each house and cabin tells its own story, a conscious effort was made to unify them using Western details as well. Among them, cowboy boot-lamps, Navajo rugs, and broken-in leather sofas and chairs. Colors, including deep red and black hues, and blue and green tones for the riverfront accommodations, also tie together the ensemble of buildings.

Authenticity and comfort figured heavily in the owner and Zarkadas’ vision for the guest ranch, too. For example, the stone-and-timber Granite Lodge recalls a railroad, complete with taller ceilings and wainscot paneling. “There’s a tradition in Montana where many of the small towns are along the railroad and they all have hotels in them,” Zarkadas explains. Hallways and walls within the lodge are lined with silver gelatin prints of the ranching industry, miners, cowboys, and even the rodeo; the spa features Western movie posters; and rooms are filled with Plains Indian artifacts. Keeping the furnishings low-key, but high quality, furthers the inviting feel of the ranch.

That attention to comfort extended as far as constructing a bowling alley on the ranch. “Initially, there was some concern that it would feel out of place,” Zarkadas explains. Referencing a local bowling alley that dates back to the 1800s in Philipsburg, a nearby mining town, however, the team was convinced it could be done. “It may seem like an anomaly, but in fact it is very old world. We just happen to have state-of-the-art pins.”