Like everything else made at Wellbeloved Woodworks, caskets and urns are made individually and by hand.  Below you will find several casket designs, which can be modified and customized to suit individual needs. My goal is for the caskets I make to feel unique, personal and handmade, but also affordable. Feel free to contact me with any questions.  

Throughout the year, as I come across uncommon pieces of lumber with especially beautiful figure, I put them aside for urns. Every urn shares a simple box shape with hand-cut dovetail construction, while the rare qualities of the wood make each urn entirely unique.

I am frequently asked why I’ve chosen to build caskets and urns.  Much of what inspires and animates me as a woodworker is the long history of woodworking as a craft. Traditionally, building caskets was an important and necessary practice for any woodworker. Today there are relatively few who take up the task.  So part of my interest in building caskets is an effort to keep that tradition alive.  

But more than that, building caskets is an additional way of paying homage to the deep connection between humans and wood, a common material that plays an uncommonly intimate role in our lives.  I think of the crib that provides the first sphere of security, comfort and rest.  The guitar held tightly to the chest through good times and bad.  The dining table, a witness to the family that grows up around it with dings and scratches adorning its surface from long and loving use.  

Wood has a quality of warmth and familiarity that draws us in, to lay our hands on its surface, to feel its age through its patina, to imagine the tree that rendered it.  Wood is both abundant and unique, firm to the touch and yet essentially porous and forgiving.  It surrounds us in so many forms from our births to our deaths.  To me, a casket represents one last embrace from this material so attendant to us throughout our lives.

Dovetailed Casket in local NM pine

New Mexican Coffin with Exposed Fingerjoints

Simple Casket Made With Local NM Pine

Dovetailed Urn in Spalted Birds-eye Maple

Dovetailed Urn in Figured Cherry

Dovetailed Urn in Tiger Oak

Dovetailed Urn in Quilted Cherry