Photo by Max Vakhtbovych on Pexels
🇺🇸 USA · Pacific Northwest
♨ Temperature
85°C
⛰ Altitude
30 m
⚗ pH
7
💧 TDS
0 mg/L
🌊 Flow rate
N/A
📅 Established
2020
✓ Verified on 2026-07-22
Cedar + Nordic Sauna is part of a wave of artisan sauna businesses that emerged in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions of the United States during the 2010s and 2020s, building wood-fired saunas using traditional Nordic construction methods with North American materials. Red western cedar — abundant in the Pacific Northwest — has proven an ideal sauna timber: naturally aromatic, resistant to moisture, and warm to the touch. The movement these businesses represent has transformed public awareness of sauna in the United States from a gym amenity to a cultural practice.
| Western Red Cedar | 0 mg/L |
| Birch aromatic | 0 mg/L |
The Pacific Northwest's Indigenous peoples — including Coast Salish, Chinook, and Duwamish nations — maintained their own sweat lodge traditions long before European contact. The Nordic sauna tradition arrived with Scandinavian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest, creating a layered history of heat bathing in the region.
The American sauna revival of the 2010s–2020s has been led by artisan builders in the Pacific Northwest and upper Midwest who build wood-fired saunas as craft objects. Social media has spread the aesthetic and the practice rapidly, and public sauna clubs have opened in cities including Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis.
Pacific Northwest cedar used in artisan sauna construction is often sourced from certified sustainable forestry operations or urban salvage timber. Wood-fired saunas have a minimal carbon footprint when burning locally sourced, dried hardwood.