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Inside Aaron Paul’s Rustic Riverside Home In Idaho

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An Emmy winner takes Architectural Digest home to Idaho, where he built a riverside retreat named after his wife.

Aaron Paul doesn’t play a small role in Idaho’s story — he was born and raised there, and he never stopped coming back. In an “Open Door” episode Architectural Digest published on February 11, 2020, the “Breaking Bad” star and his wife Lauren walk cameras through the custom mountain home they built from the ground up near the resort town of McCall. They call it Camp Pretty Bird, a nod to Paul’s pet name for Lauren, and it’s as much a working family cabin as it is a design statement.

• Camp Pretty Bird sits on a riverside property near McCall, Idaho, and was designed and built new by Bozeman-based Pearson Design Group alongside interior designer Jake Arnold.
• The home leans on log and timber construction, local stone, and heated concrete floors built specifically to handle heavy mountain snowfall.
• Signature spaces include a central stone fireplace where the family plays backgammon, a yard used for sledding with their daughter, and a relaxation wing built around a sauna made from reclaimed cedar.

Building From Scratch in McCall

Rather than buy and renovate, Paul and his wife started with raw land along the river and worked with Pearson Design Group to design the compound from the studs out. The Bozeman, Montana firm specializes in the kind of frontier-cabin architecture that defines ski towns across the Northern Rockies, and it shows in Camp Pretty Bird’s heavy timber frame, stacked-log walls, and stonework pulled from the surrounding landscape. Interior designer Jake Arnold handled the inside, threading rustic materials with cleaner, modern furnishings so the house doesn’t read like a museum piece — it reads like a place a family actually lives.

Paul, an Idaho native, has talked about wanting the home to echo the kind of childhood he had growing up in the state — a detail that shaped decisions down to the choice of reclaimed wood and the placement of windows to frame the river view.

Built for Snow, Not Just Style

McCall sits in one of Idaho’s snowiest corridors, and the house was engineered around that reality. Heated concrete floors run through the main living areas, letting the family walk around barefoot in a home that’s otherwise wrapped in log and stone. It’s a practical fix dressed up as a design choice — the kind of detail that separates a genuine four-season mountain house from a vacation cabin that only works in July.

Camp Pretty Bird — named for Aaron Paul’s pet name for his wife, Lauren — was designed and built from scratch with Pearson Design Group and Jake Arnold.

The Fireplace, the Sled Hill, and the Sauna

The tour’s emotional center is the great room, anchored by a massive stone fireplace big enough to gather the whole family around for backgammon. Outside, the yard slopes into the kind of snow-covered run that’s tailor-made for sledding with their daughter, and the property backs right up to the river the home is named for. When it’s time to warm back up, there’s a dedicated relaxation wing built around a custom sauna crafted from reclaimed cedar — a detail that turns a design flourish into something the family actually uses daily during Idaho winters.

Anyone who’s spent time chasing a similarly ambitious build — whether it’s a full log cabin workshop or a from-scratch dream house — knows how much coordination it takes to get materials, structure, and finish work to line up the way Camp Pretty Bird does.

An Idaho Native’s Return

What separates this build from a typical celebrity mountain retreat is the personal math behind it. Paul isn’t a transplant chasing a trend near a ski resort — he’s a McCall-area native who used the project to recreate the kind of landscape he grew up hiking and exploring, not far from terrain like the Sawtooth range that draws hikers from across the state. That’s part of why the house leans so hard into local stone and timber instead of importing a look from somewhere else.

The Architectural Digest tour doesn’t linger long on square footage or price tag — it’s built around the backgammon table, the sled hill, and the cedar sauna, which is exactly the version of the house Aaron Paul wanted people to see.