Nathan Ferguson, a carpenter in Perth, Ont., who regularly works on cottages in the area, is heating things up with his saunas—except these aren’t your regular hot structures. They’re portable, built on the framework of old horse trailers.
Step 1 in creating a sauna from an old horse trailer is cleaning out the “road apples” and hay. After removing any other surplus parts, he strips, sands, and rustproofs the metal frame as needed. He also wires the interior for lights, replaces the tires, paints the exterior, and, of course, lines the inside with cedar and installs a stove.
Shaping the interior wood to fit a horse trailer is not a challenge for Nathan, a master woodworker (he jokes that choosing the exterior paint colour was harder), but it does require careful measuring and precise saw cuts. Many, many cuts.
Cedar in saunas, says Nathan, is actually more Canadian than Scandinavian. In those countries, they tend to use nordic spruce, which is less aromatic than cedar.
Nathan didn’t stop at building a solo horse-trailer sauna; he decided renting them out could be a viable side hustle. So he started a company, Wild River Sauna, and built several more. He delivers the sauna to customers along with a bag of firewood and an essential oil blend to mix into the water for sauna steam. And just in case you forget where the saunas came from, each one is adorned with a reminder of its origins: a rusted horseshoe.
This story originally appeared in our Winter ’25 issue.
Related Story Watch how the Cottage Coach transforms an awkward outdoor space with a floating deck
Related Story Unwind at these 7 Nordic spas in cottage country
Related Story This Quebec cottager built her very own Finnish-style sauna—from scratch