Halloween is almost here, which means many Islanders are breaking out decorative reminders of the season, including jack-o-lanterns, witches’ cauldrons, skeletons and even a few Dracula-style coffins.

But at one Island business, coffins adorn the premises year-round. And they evoke not fright, but, business owner Marcus Daly says, a sense of higher purpose and peace, a calling that he finds deeply moving.

For the past year, Daly, a local carpenter, has been engaged in this new venture, Vashon Island Coffin Company, providing affordable and yet meticulously crafted burial vessels made by hand from sustainably harvested lumber from the Pacific Northwest and Vashon Island.

Daly, 42, has labored as a farmer, landscaper, commercial fisherman and boat builder, but he has found satisfaction and a sense of calling in his new line of work.

“I like the idea of working with my hands doing something that is really tactile and practical, and with coffin-making, you have that,” Daly said. His new company, he added, is an expression of his longtime dream to do something that is “good for people, respects their dignity, saves them money and supports a healthy planet.”

The coffin company is situated at Daly’s home — a spot that seems a far cry from anything spooky.

Daly, a bookish-looking and quietly intense carpenter, lives with his wife Kelly and their five young children, ages 10 to 1, on a small organic farm nestled in a clearing in the woods off Wax Orchard Road.

Life is abundant here: A rooster crows and a pair of goats graze in a pasture near a bountiful vegetable garden and a thick blueberry patch. The tidy farmhouse boasts a wrap-around porch filled with the evidence of a growing family — bins full of rubber boots, shoes and toys left behind by Daly’s brood of children.

In this same bucolic setting stands a large, clean and well-lit woodworking workshop, filled with an incongruous sight — rows of unadorned caskets.

But it really isn’t a contrast at all to Daly, who sees death as a part of life’s continuum and coffins as necessary, practical and even beautiful objects.

“Look at the wood,” Daly told a visitor to the workshop on a recent fall day. “It’s beautiful, simple and always unique, like any person. It has the stamp of genuineness.”

Daly offers three lines of caskets, made from pine and Vashon-grown alder and Douglas fir, all crafted without any metal fasteners or adornments. Many caskets come complete with straw-stuffed beds made of organic cotton material.

The prices of the handmade caskets range from $750 to $1,600, well below the average cost of $2,300 found in a 2007 survey conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association. The same year, another study by the Casket & Funeral Supply Association of America found that 65 percent of the caskets purchased in the United State were made of metal.

Daly’s bio-degradable alternatives include a classic six-sided coffin, another that is long and rectangular and a tapered design called “Lolek,” which Daly said was inspired by the simple wood casket used for the funeral Mass of Pope John Paul II.

That casket, Daly said, “spoke to me about the ultimate equality of all people and what we have in common. It was a humble example and a good reminder that earthly wealth and splendor are passing.”

Daly, a faithful parishioner at St. John Vianney Church on Vashon, said that he was also inspired by the unadorned wood caskets that are part of the Orthodox Jewish tradition.

Since starting his new business, he has also become a font of information about a burgeoning movement in the United States toward home funerals and so-called green burial sites, which eschew the use of toxic embalming fluids, encourage the use of biodegradable caskets and urns and allow cemetery clients to be spared the expense of purchasing concrete burial vaults intended to prevent the ground from collapsing as decay naturally occurs.

“When a person chooses simple green burial over extravagant and sometimes toxic conventional burial, their death gives physical nourishment to new life the way nature intended,” Daly said. “It’s really a much more dignified way to return to the earth than sealed in a steel and concrete chamber, and it releases little if no carbon emissions the way cremation does.”

Daly is hopeful that his company will help raise awareness on Vashon about the need for a green burial site on the Island. Currently, Vashon Cemetery — like nearly every cemetery in the state — requires that all bodies must be placed in concrete burial vaults. But Daly hopes that someday soon, there will be a place where Islanders can be buried without first having their caskets sealed in such a container.

But for now, Daly is busy building coffins, including several he has donated to charities. One of those charities, Gloria’s Angels, serves the needs of families with children who have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses.

In fact, it was while building a coffin for a child in June that Daly’s fledgling company suffered a temporary setback, when Daly sliced off part of one of his fingers with a table saw. The pain from that accident, Daly said, gave him a chance to compare the relatively minor loss of a finger to the devastating trauma of losing a child.

But now, Daly’s finger has healed, and he is back on track with the business. One of his plans for the future, he said, is to hold workshops in coffin-building and invite Islanders to take a more hands-on role in preparing for an event everyone will have to face sooner or later.

“There is so much mystery in death, but the coffin isn’t a mystery,” he said. “It’s just a wooden box. Although it is pregnant with meaning, it is a simple thing. There’s no mystique.”

For more information about Vashon Island Coffin Company, visit www.islandcoffin.com or call 463-6245.