Seems to me that a funeral home is not the place to worry about haunting. The people who passed through there died somewhere else, after all. --SRS


The Two-Story Conversation Starter

WHEN Jean-Marie Grenier was growing up in the Norman village of Rugles, he lived on a street called Rue du Cimetière. On funeral days, women wearing long black veils padded by behind a horse-drawn hearse, a sight that terrified him as a little boy.

"Les dames en noir," recalled Mr. Grenier, 56, a sculptor who immigrated to New York in the late 1970s. "I was so afraid."

In one of those great coincidences of real estate, Mr. Grenier and his wife, Jane, 50, a promotion and marketing executive at Condé Nast, now live in a sepulchral sort of place on Driggs Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, near McCarren Park. From around 1900 until the mid-'70s, the building operated as the Dekarski Funeral Home, a venerable institution in a neighborhood whose Polish roots remain strong even in the face of what Ms. Grenier describes as "hipster creep."

The hit TV show "Six Feet Under" did much to familiarize Americans with the innards of funeral homes. Nevertheless, even some fairly sophisticated people find the idea of living in one more than slightly spooky. At a Valentine's Day party at the Greniers' a few years ago, one guest was so freaked out that he couldn't bear to linger under their roof. "Sitting on the couch, I just felt something," the man confessed nervously to his hosts before fleeing the premises.

Almost from the moment they married in 1987, the couple had been real estate gypsies, living first in Mr. Grenier's TriBeCa loft with his roommates ("I told him married people don't have roommates," Ms. Grenier said), then in a Downtown Brooklyn loft that she describes as so enormous "you needed Rollerblades to go to the bathroom."

Thirteen years ago, when they were poised to be evicted from a loft on the Lower East Side because the owner wanted the place for his own use, they decided to check out the increasingly desirable Brooklyn waterfront.

One day, Mr. Grenier saw a two-line newspaper ad for an apartment on Driggs Avenue that mentioned a lot of open space. The ad made no mention of the building's previous life, and space was what he was after, so he headed off to the broker's office.

"I was so excited," Mr. Grenier recalled, his words tumbling out as he described his first sight of the apartment. "I drew a little sketch on a napkin, but my hands were trembling so much, I couldn't do it."

That night he couldn't sleep, afraid that someone else would nab the apartment before he and his wife could make their move.

In May 1996, the couple rented the ground floor of the two-story structure for $1,575 a month. Nine years later, they paid $940,000 to buy the entire 2,000-square-foot building, which includes a rental apartment on the top floor, where the owners of the funeral home used to live.

Despite the wisecracks that visitors invariably make, these days there's nothing particularly creepy about the place. Yet poignant reminders of its earlier life are visible everywhere.

The facade, with its three arched doorways of dark wood — one for the bodies, a second for the office and a third for the public — looks so ecclesiastical that Ms. Grenier tells cab drivers to watch for a building that "looks like a church but it's not."

The basement where coffins once awaited their final resting place has been converted to a studio where Mr. Grenier produces the sinuous white stoneware that is his trademark (examples can be seen on his Web site, jm-grenier.com). But a dusty corner is jammed with ecclesiastic bric-a-brac, including a small forest of standing aluminum candle holders.

The couple's bedroom, where as Ms. Grenier is quick to remind one and all with a meaningful roll of her eyes, they "did the work," looks unremarkable. However, the adjacent bathroom is dominated by a ceramic urinal and a hip bath (why a hip bath, the Greniers have no idea), and was, the couple believe, one of a pair of his-and-hers restrooms. The urinal is Ms. Grenier's single favorite item in the house, although she is also extremely fond of the claw-footed tub that her husband acquired and installed just outside their bedroom so that she can take a proper bath.

Echoes of the building's past are especially pervasive in what is now the living room-dining room area. Stained-glass windows, dark wood trim, skylights and Gothic accents like arches serve as a reminder that this was once a pair of viewing chapels where two services could be conducted simultaneously. Or so the Greniers believe; as with the hip bath, sorting out certain details of the building's history can be tricky.

The old funeral home office is now a tiny but impressively outfitted kitchen. On one wall hangs a formidable assortment of inky cast-iron skillets; on another is a string of garlic that the Greniers brought back from France, where they have a summer house. The refrigerator is a basic Kenmore model — with a Sub-Zero magnet affixed to one side to add a little class.

In the back of the house is what is officially the garden, though thanks to the arrival of a new building literally inches away, the area feels more like an enclosed box. "A Zen garden," Ms. Grenier said. It is surrounded by slats of ipê, a Brazilian hardwood, and home to a single potted philodendron.

While the smell of embalming fluid has long since disappeared, she has embraced rather than repressed the building's past, although to be safe she cleansed the place upon arrival by burning sage to encourage "any troubled spirits" to go elsewhere. "I'm very conscious of all the end-of-life moments that had taken place here," she said. "And I wished all the spirits well."

That Mr. Grenier, who grew up seeing hearses pass the house of his childhood, now lives in a converted funeral home seems the work of fate. So does the fact that Ms. Grenier, some of whose ancestors came from Poland, has ended up in what has long been the city's premier Polish neighborhood. And she is delighted that many of the artisans who have done work on the Greniers' house are local Polish-Americans.

"It feels like kismet," she said.