In the traditional structural design process, rural buildings require a lot of manual calculations and repeated modeling. However, due to the construction cost, rural buildings cannot be designed and checked professionally by designers like urban buildings, and their safety and economy are difficult to meet the requirements. Therefore, an intelligent design approach to structural design of rural light steel frame structure was proposed, including the intelligent modeling and intelligent optimization. Based on the automatic layer automatic classification method (ALCM), optical character recognition technology (OCR) and adaptive block algorithm, BIM intelligent modeling method of rural light steel frame structure was proposed where layer recognition, the extraction of axis text data and wall contour were included, and generated structural models meted the requirements of practical application. Based on the proposed two-stage simulated annealing algorithm, the intelligent optimization method of rural light steel frame structure was given. The proposed intelligent design method was verified by practical engineering cases and the results showed that the proposed intelligent design method of rural light steel frame structure was feasible. Compared with the traditional manual design method, the design period could be shortened by more than 70%, and the material consumption and structural design parameters were similar.