The mere words “new construction” can cause some to bristle, especially in wild, rustic settings where a fresh, shiny home is as out of place (and about as unwelcome) as a big-box store. But with reclaimed wood exteriors, even the most recently completed structures seem to blend in, to belong.

On a 6,000-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies sits a single-room guest cabin made of reclaimed timber.

Drawing on Norwegian stave church architecture, this boathouse in Creede, Colorado, wasbuilt over six years. Bryan Anderson and “accomplice and fellow perfectionist” John Holmes, an artist and a carpenter, used reclaimed lumber—including boards from the site’s original garage—for the structure. “The fact that the wood is mostly salvage is true to stave architecture,” Anderson notes.

At this Keith Summerour–designed estate in Camden, Georgia, a copper roof tops the poolhouse and painting studio, which was constructed with reclaimed-heart-pine siding and columns of Savannah gray brick.

Architect Annabelle Selldorf installed shutters and board-and-batten siding of reclaimed barn wood on the exterior of this home in the Colorado Rockies to achieve shadows. “It’s immensely rewarding when the spatial moves you’ve thought about turn out the way you imagined or better,” she says.