The Benefits of Working with a Locally Trusted Monument Company

With a custom shape, the risk isn't just picking the wrong design. It's picking a design that never gets built the way you imagined, or one the cemetery won't let you place at all.

That last part catches families off guard constantly. Cemeteries here have real limits on height, width, base dimensions, and how far a memorial can deviate from a standard footprint, and those limits differ from one burial ground to the next. A distinctive shape pushes right up against those rules by definition. We've worked in these cemeteries for decades, so we can tell you early whether your idea will clear approval, and if it won't, how to adjust the design so it keeps its spirit and still gets placed. Finding that out from us in week one is far better than finding out from the cemetery in month three.

Then there's fabrication. A custom silhouette has to be drawn, templated, cut, shaped, and finished, and each of those steps is a chance for something to drift from what you pictured. Because our craftsmen do that work themselves, you're not sending a sketch off to a distant factory and hoping. You can see the full-size drawing, walk into our showroom and look at the actual granite color under real light, and change your mind before anything is permanent.

And a custom monument is heavier and more irregular than a standard upright, which makes the foundation and the set genuinely matter. We build the foundation and set the memorial with our own equipment, so there's one company accountable for the whole thing from first sketch to final seal.

Types of Monuments We Offer

A distinctive shape is one of many directions your memorial can take. Browse the full range and see what speaks to you:

• Traditional Monuments — Classic upright designs that have marked family plots for generations.
• Christian Monuments — Crosses, praying hands, and sacred imagery for families of faith.
• Celtic & Irish Monuments — Celtic crosses and knotwork honoring Irish heritage.
• Jewish Monuments — Memorials designed in keeping with Jewish tradition and custom.
• Hearts — Single, double, and triple hearts, the enduring symbol of love.
• Laser & Glass Art Etchings — Portraits, scenes, and fine detail etched into polished granite.
• Hand Carved Monuments — Sculpted stone artistry shaped by hand, not by machine.
• Classic Shapes — Timeless forms with clean, quiet lines.
• Bronze & Gold Leaf Lettering — Rich lettering and accents that catch the light for decades.

Not sure where to begin? Our memorial options page lays out everything side by side, or you can view all our memorials at once.

Monument Services in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre & Northeast PA

Families across the Lackawanna and Wyoming Valleys work with us at every stage of the process:

Design. We start with what you want to say. Bring a photograph, a rough sketch on a napkin, or nothing but a memory, and we'll shape it into a design. You'll see and approve a full-size drawing before we cut.

Craft. Our team handles the cutting, carving, shaping, and lettering in house, working in granite and bronze sourced from quarries around the world. Distinctive shapes pair naturally with hand carving and with laser and glass art etchings when you want a portrait or scene worked into the stone.

Approve and install. We handle the cemetery's requirements and permits, pour a durable foundation, and set and seal the memorial ourselves.

Care for it later. We add dates and names to existing family monuments, and we clean and restore older memorials that have weathered.

We also help families who are working on very different timelines. If someone has recently passed, our at-need monument guidance walks you through what happens next, with no rush. If you're planning your own memorial while there's no pressure at all, planning ahead is the best possible time to design something truly personal, because you get to make every choice yourself. And if you haven't settled on a plot yet, our cemetery plot checklist covers what to ask before you buy, including which shapes that cemetery permits.

Why Families Trust Monuments by Parise

We came to this work from the other side of it. Our family has served the area's grieving families since 1941, and by the 1990s we kept hearing the same thing after funerals: the monument purchase had been the disappointing part. So in 1997 we opened a full-service monument company to fix that, and before we sold anything, we trained in every corner of the craft under a memorial specialist with more than 40 years behind him.

Ambitious designs need a shop that can actually execute them. Ours does. Our skilled craftsmen are the ones cutting, carving, and lettering your memorial, drawing from one of the region's largest selections of granite and bronze. And when it's finished, our own crew sets it on a foundation we build, because a remarkable monument set carelessly is a monument that leans.

Our written guarantee backs the whole thing. The granite is certified free from defects and won't chip, crack, or disintegrate. Bronze is cast by quality foundries with lettering hand chased and highlighted. If any part ever proves defective in material or workmanship, we replace it at no expense to you or your heirs.

You can also see your options in person year round. Our Blakely location is the area's only all-inclusive indoor monument showroom, which matters more than you'd think when you're comparing granite colors for a custom piece in the middle of a Pennsylvania February.

Read more about our family and our guarantee, or hear directly from the families we've served on our testimonials page.

Trusted in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre & Surrounding Communities

We design, build, and set distinctive shaped monuments for families across Northeast Pennsylvania, including Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Blakely, Carbondale, Pittston, Dickson City, Olyphant, Jessup, Archbald, Dunmore, Clarks Summit, Peckville, Throop, Taylor, Old Forge, Moosic, Avoca, Duryea, Forest City, Honesdale, Tunkhannock, and the communities around them.

There's a reason custom work resonates here. This is a region built by people with strong identities: coal families, parish families, hunters, union members, veterans, volunteer firefighters, teachers, and grandparents whose gardens or kitchens were the center of everything. When a family sits down with us and starts describing the person they lost, the shape usually reveals itself pretty quickly. Some of the most meaningful memorials we've built came from a detail someone almost didn't mention.

Three locations keep us close by: our Blakely showroom at 1975 Scranton Carbondale Highway, our Carbondale display at 89 Farview Street, and our Clifford display at 18 Airport Road.

Contact Us For Distinctive Shaped Monuments in Northeast PA Today

A custom memorial should feel like the person it honors, and getting there starts with a simple conversation about who they were. The team at Monuments By Parise will help you turn that into a design, show you exactly what it will look like before we build it, and take care of everything through installation.

Call Monuments By Parise at 570-382-3558 or contact us online today to learn more about distinctive shaped monuments in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Northeast Pennsylvania.