Now that its three-year, 110-mile journey across Minnesota has come to an end, the Winton Guest House, a 1987 structure bystarchitect Frank Gehry, has settled into its new location in Owatonna at the University of St. Thomas, ready to open its doors to thepublic on October 16.

Mike and Penny Winton commissioned Gehry to design the guesthouse for their grandchildren to stay in when they visited the Wintons' Lake Minnetonka home. Inspired bythe Italian artist Giorgio Morandi's still-life paintings of of bottles, boxes,cups, and vases, Gehry designed a segmented house of six sculptural, geometric shapes, connected by a central room. "When I discovered the pictures of GiorgioMorandi, I just went nuts because Morandi was drawing bottles which wereessentially one-room buildings and creating villages of bottles," the architect once toldauthor Barbara Isenberg. He also paid homage to Philip Johnson, who designedthe Wintons' main house. Johnson had once said that all the best buildings inhistory have only a single room, like Chartres Cathedral.

"I didn't want to mess around with Uncle Philip's baby,"Gehry had said, according to a release. "I'm sure he was horrified when he heard I was doing it."

Playing on these inspirations, Gehry designed the Winton Guest around the central living room, a 35-foot-tall pyramid shape capped with a skylight at its apex, finished withblack painted metal. The remaining five rooms surround it like a pinwheel, each made of distinct materials: dolomitic limestone for the curved bedroom; Finnish plywood and aluminum strips for the rectangular kitchenette; galvanized sheet metal for the rectangular sleeping loft; warm brick for the fireplace alcove; and stained fir plywood for the bathroom.

The guest house's completion in 1987 was met with accolades, fromHouse and Garden's design award of the year to a spot on Timemagazine's "Best of '87" list. The Wintons sold their property in2002, and it was eventually donated to the university in 2007. In 2008, moverssplit the home into seven pieces, and after setbacks caused by the frigid Minnesota climate, were able to complete its transport and reassembly this year.