A Custom Sauna Brings Year-Round Warmth to Northern Minnesota

Cedar & Stone Nordic Sauna infuses cozy spirit into one family’s cabin retreat

December 8, 2025

A snow covered cabin overlooking trees — Situated adjacent to a cabin in northern Minnesota, owners of this sauna from Cedar & Stone Nordic Sauna consider it a gathering place, complete with a deck, landscaping, and Adirondack chairs.

You can see, feel, and hear it. But can you say it? “I might be saying it wrong, ‘löyly.’ In Finnish, it’s the steam that rises off a sauna’s hot rocks, and the same word means spirit,” says Matt Norman, sauna devotee. “It’s like you’re filling the space with the spirit.”

While saunas’ popularity in America has heated and cooled, they’re integral to Finns’ lives. That culture and spirit appealed to Norman and his family so much they hired sauna craftspeople to build one at their cabin in northern Minnesota.

This is not a barrel-shaped DIY sauna you’ve seen online, or the work of a local bathroom remodeler. Instead, Cedar & Stone Nordic Sauna crafts these Finnish family rooms using the same love your grandma stirred into a holiday meal.

Norman and his wife, Kari, met Co-founder Justin Juntunen through one of the Cedar & Stone’s sauna experience events in Duluth. They loved it and knew they wanted more than just a functionally steamy American sauna. “We’re in this moment right now, culturally, where people attach saunas to a sentiment that is desirable,” Juntunen says. Saunas provide the Normans health benefits, community and culture, and a spiritual connection.

“Sauna is the space that helps me live better and work through hard things,” adds Juntunen. His family gatherings happened, he said, in two main places: the dinner table and the sauna. “And if we were all around the dinner table, the sauna was heating, and we were heading there soon.”

light flowing into the sauna's wooden interior — The sauna is powered by electric heat and warms quickly, requiring little maintenance.

“It’s said in Finland that all people are created equal, and nowhere more so than in the sauna,” Juntunen continues. “You don’t come in as the business owner or the lawyer. You just come in as you, in your bathing suit or a towel or less. You’re equal, and there’s freedom in that. And I think that’s uncommon in our society.”

With electric heat, the sauna warms quickly and needs just minor cleaning for maintenance. “It’s a piece of art in our yard,” Norman says. It’s their third year with the sauna and they added a deck and landscaping, plus relaxing Adirondack chairs and invigorating fitness equipment. “It’s our gathering place, even when we’re not doing sauna.”