Custom Coffins Can Give Last Goodby a Personal Touch

Other-worldly New Age music wafts among the coffins at the Ghia Gallery, a showroom of death where the terminally ill can plan and accessorize their own funerals.

Tucked away in the city’s industrial zone, the gallery offers a cut-rate caskets--bare wood to flashy chrome--urns abstract and absurd, and even jewelry in which to stash cremated remains.

About 40% of the clientele are people dying of AIDS who want their funerals to have a personal touch.

“They are the ones who have shifted the concept of death,” said Rhonda di Sautel, who owns the gallery along with Alex Ghia and Karen Leonard. “I’m tickled at the way people have added humor to get rid of the fear.”

The 2-year-old gallery takes a humorous and sometimes bizarre approach to funerals and dying.

A coffin shaped like King Tut’s sarcophagus sells for $7,600. Coffins in chrome rub lids with no-frills pressed-wood boxes.

One pink-and-white casket with a silky, wedding cake-like interior appears perfect for Rhett and Scarlett’s daughter Bonnie Blue after her fatal tumble from a pony in “Gone With the Wind.” The price tag: $750.

“If someone wants polka dots, they can have polka dots,” said di Sautel.

Urns span the graceful to the goofy. A tall, sweeping vessel with jagged glass points resembles an abstract sculpture. Another looks like a dwarf with a lamp shade on his head. The two-foot-tall fellow, complete with sunglasses and feet, has a drawer where people can place a loved one’s ashes.

Along with the humor, however, is a serious mission to take the commercialism out of death and provide a personalized alternative to funeral homes, Ghia said.

“You’ve been to one funeral, you’ve been to them all,” said Ghia. “We’re suggesting that you do have options if you want them.”

But the offbeat approach has gotten a chilly response from the funeral industry, according to the owners.

When the gallery opened two years ago, Ghia said funeral directors would come in, nose around the showrooms and make threatening comments about the coffins. “They wanted to know where we got them,” he said.

One local funeral director confirmed he isn’t wild about Ghia.

“I went down there and looked at it. What they actually do is carry inexpensive merchandise (caskets), from cheap stuff to medium quality,” said Steven Welch of Duggan’s Funeral Service in San Francisco. “But it’s not quite the quality you might have at a funeral home.”

As a result of complaints from mortuaries, some major casket vendors refuse to sell to the gallery, Ghia said. The caskets they carry are high-quality nonetheless, the owners said.

And, the growing market for alternative funerals keeps business strong.

“I compare it to the trouble people go to take a trip to Europe. What about the final departure? People didn’t think about that until now.”