I wanted to build a barn,” says Richard Yulman, the client for the Inverted Guest House in Lake George, New York. “Just a country barn where we could park cars and put stuff in the winter.” What started as a simple shed kind of project, though, became a 5,600-square-foot building that features a pair of two-bedroom guest apartments on either side of an eight-car garage. With its rugged-yet-elegant copper cladding and flat roofs, it looks like no barn. But its industrial materials capture the utilitarian spirit of rural buildings and its large, folding doors and shutters connect it to the light and views of its wooded site.

The guest house/garage is the third in an ongoing series of projects that New York City–based architect Peter Gluck has designed for Yulman’s 17-acre estate on Lake George. Although Yulman had traditional tastes in architecture when he first bought the lakeside property and its early-20th-century house, he developed a more contemporary sensibility while working with Gluck.