When Endswell Funeral Home in Hillsborough first opened in 2022, it aimed to provide a different kind of end-of-life service to community members through aquamation. The process of using water and potassium hydroxide to break down bodies was still relatively new to the state, but the option and Endswell’s environmentally conscious approach have since caught on with the community.
Now, its owners are thinking creatively again to market to the area’s sensibilities. The funeral home is expanding to Chapel Hill and Carrboro and opening an art gallery within a new, dedicated event space.
Owner Hunter Beattie said when thinking of further expansion for Endswell, it felt too “obvious” to expand into Raleigh or Cary with their growing populations. Instead, he and his wife and business partner, Veronica, chose to look closer to home – where they have good business relationships and could walk to work. And when commercial space on the ground floor of Greenbridge Condominiums became available, he felt confident that it would be the right spot.
“My mother lives in this building,” Beattie said. “Her boyfriend of 10 years lives in this building. My sister-in-law was married on the fifth-floor balcony. And in my 20s, when we moved my mother here, I probably had four or five Super Bowl parties at the fifth-floor Sky Lounge at Greenbridge.”
The Beatties bought two units in July from Greenbridge, which were previously used by Cindy Sparia’s LIGHT art gallery and design space and the offices of website developer Medaxion. The 6,000 square feet fronting North Merritt Mill Road will not only house Endswell’s administrative operations, but function as a space for memorial services and end of life celebrations. Those events will take place in an updated art gallery, Beattie said, named AfterLight as a nod to the previous owner and to the space’s primary purpose.
“We’ll curate a full art gallery here with a very soft end-of-life theme,” he described. “[We will be] focusing more on abstract work, but we may have a show where there’s photography and paintings of dilapidated buildings that are being overtaken by kudzu. And there’s graffiti, so there’s new life being breathed back into a building… so it may not be specific to people, but there will always be an end-of-life theme.”
Endswell co-owner Hunter Beattie sits in the new Chapel Hill space of the funeral home, located on the ground floor of the Greenbridge Condominiums building. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Endswell bought Unit 110 of the Greenbridge building, which has an entrance fronting North Merritt Mill Road. Beattie said the entrance to the arts gallery, AfterLight, will be here. (Photo via Google Maps.)
Becoming the first funeral home with an incorporated art gallery is just the latest example of Endswell attempting to stand out from the traditional funeral home experience – which Beattie likes to reference as having dated “maroon-carpeted, floral wallpaper” interiors. Beyond launching as an aquamation first service, Endswell also quickly added natural burial preparation to its portfolio in keeping with its environment-focused values and became the first carbon-neutral aquamation business after adding solar panels to its Hillsborough facility.
Arguably, the idea of using a mixed-use development’s retail space for a funeral home might be even odder than adding an art gallery to a funeral home. But Beattie’s vision is to have AfterLight fit into the Town of Chapel Hill’s goal of businesses driving foot traffic along the streetscape. Over the last four years at its Hillsborough space, Endswell made free educational sessions and communal gatherings a key part of its offerings. Beattie estimates in the last year, they hosted roughly 100 events, ranging from anthropologists discussing different cultures’ approaches around death to learning about end-of-life autonomy options to workshops on how to write an obituary. It’s a way to keep the space activated beyond the handful of times each month it will be used for ceremonies.
“We don’t have to exist separately from the community as this service people only call upon one time, and they never want to think about again,” Beattie said. “We’re not trying to throw this into people’s faces. We’re trying to encourage them to think openly and honestly about the fact that we all face this at some point, and that it can be very healthy to come to terms with it.”
The AfterLight art gallery is just the latest step, with Beattie saying the plan is to become a stop on Carrboro’s monthly art walk. As he prepares for a grand opening this fall, work is underway to curate the gallery using local artists – like he did for Endswell’s urn gallery in Hillsborough. The philosophy behind that initial gallery was to allow people to have a unique piece of artwork for their loved ones’ remains to be in compared to something mass-produced. AfterLight will aim to provide a similar experience: recognizing that as everyone reacts to and interprets art differently, it is the same with navigating end-of-life experiences and discussions.
So far, Beattie said, the feedback and interest from the community is positive. It helps for the business’ new space to be right on the border of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, capturing the latter’s counterculture and artistic spirit while blending the former’s intellectual curiosity.
“We have a lot of unique people who are artists and environmentalists and academics,” he said. “And you almost couldn’t imagine them walking into the traditional funeral home with the maroon carpet and the floral wallpaper. They’re being very intentional about this decision [and] they’re choosing something unique that represents their personality.
“I think the art gallery-funeral home [combo] will sound strange initially – until it doesn’t anymore,” Beattie concluded. “People will start to use our services, and then expect to walk into a funeral home and see beautiful, local art. Because…why not?”
Featured image by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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