The story behind our name, and the wall that tells it.
Walk into our flagship Fairbanks home at 10 Rosella Ave, steps from Creamer's Field, and you'll find a cedar accent wall with a set of antlers mounted on it. Its main materials are reclaimed: the cedar, the antlers and the plaque they hang on all came from a log cabin we owned in the woods off Farmers Loop Road.
It's the best way we know to explain our name. So here's the story.
Aurora & Cedar is the two places we call home, in one name.
The northern lights are Fairbanks' signature. From late August into April, on clear, dark nights, they can fill the whole sky over the Tanana Valley. They're the reason so many people make the trip north.
Cedar stands for Washington's evergreen forests: western red cedar, Douglas fir and hemlock, from the Cascades to the coast. Our Washington homes in Tacoma, Puyallup and DuPont sit close to those woods.
The two are closer than a map makes them look. For most travelers, the way to Alaska runs through Seattle. Washington is the Pacific Northwest. Alaska is the Northwest taken about as far as it goes: the far, far Northwest. We live and host at both ends of that route.
When we first moved to Fairbanks, we bought a true log cabin on Rambling Road, off Farmers Loop, on its own wooded acreage in the spruce and birch north of town. It had sat empty for several years before it came to us.
The plan was to live there ourselves first, then turn it into an Airbnb: a full renovation into a wet cabin, with running water and a cedar sauna. On clear winter nights the aurora came up right over the roof. That's the cabin at the top of this page.
Then life moved faster than the project. Our son Charlie arrived, and we were relocating to Washington. We couldn't give the cabin the time it needed, so we made the hard call to sell.
The antlers came with the property. Out by the road stood a makeshift game pole where the previous owner used to dress out his game, with antlers hanging from the tree beside it and an old archery target leaning against the trunk. Our best guess is he bow-hunted his own acreage.
The big set of moose antlers is saved for a larger project at our own house. The smaller set is the one on the wall at Rosella. We cleaned and polished it, then mounted it on a plaque cut from the cabin's own reclaimed wood, so the mount itself is a piece of that cabin.
Saved for later
On our wall nowAndrew loves saunas and sauna culture, and plans to travel the world to experience how different cultures take on the natural sauna. So the one part of the cabin plan we did finish was a cedar sauna.
In March 2026, Andrew built it in an outbuilding on the property with Vivian's father, Valdir, who came up from Brazil to help. They took the space down to bare rafters and rebuilt it with new wiring and ventilation, proper insulation and a heat barrier, and tongue-and-groove cedar on every wall and the ceiling.
When we packed up, we saved every cedar end piece and offcut. Those boards are the paneling behind the antlers at Rosella today.
We scaled the plan back. Instead of the full wet-cabin renovation, we finished it as a clean, ready-to-live-in dry cabin and left the final touches for its new owners to make their own.
In Fairbanks, a dry cabin has heat and power but no running water, and plenty of people here live that way by choice. It sold fast, to the right owner.
Then · The cabin off Farmers LoopNow · 10 Rosella AveThat cabin was real Alaska at the end of a dirt road, and we loved it. We also know what living out there takes.
So we brought the best of it into town: reclaimed cedar and real antlers in a renovated historic duplex at 10 Rosella Ave, steps from Creamer's Field, where sandhill cranes stop over every spring and fall. It's the same idea behind every home we host in Alaska and Washington.
Questions? Email Hello@AuroraAndCedarStays.com
