At 318 South Driver Street in Durham, a single storefront does two jobs at once: it is a working antique and furnishing shop, and it is the home base for a small interior and landscape design practice. Design Bank calls itself a destination antique and furnishing shop coexisting in tandem with detail-rich interior and landscape services, and that description is literal rather than marketing language. Walk in and the front of the space functions as a retail floor, stocked with furniture and decorative objects pulled from a range of countries and design eras, from mid-century case pieces to older European antiques, all curated rather than warehoused in bulk. Behind that retail layer sits the design side of the business, where clients can hire help planning a room or a yard rather than simply buying a piece and leaving.
Design Bank’s interior design work is led by Craven Miller, while landscape design is handled separately by John Hykes, giving the shop two distinct in-house specialties instead of one generalist service. That split lets a client walk in for a chair and walk out having also booked a consultation about a backyard redesign, something a typical antique mall or standalone design firm cannot offer under one address. The retail and service sides share the same physical showroom, so browsing the furniture on the floor doubles as a preview of the kind of pieces the design team likes to work with on client projects.
The shop keeps limited public retail hours, open Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with additional access available by appointment for design clients or serious furniture buyers who need a different time. That schedule reflects the hybrid nature of the business: weekends for walk-in shoppers browsing the sales floor, and appointment slots built around design consultations and installation work during the rest of the week. The Driver Street address sits in an industrial pocket of Durham away from the busier downtown core, giving the shop the kind of open, warehouse-style square footage that a furniture and antiques showroom needs to display larger case goods and outdoor pieces without feeling cramped.
Sourcing objects and furniture from around the world and across multiple design periods, rather than sticking to one era or region, is what keeps the inventory feeling more like a design showroom than a typical secondhand shop. A shopper looking for a single antique side table can find one, and a homeowner planning a full room or landscape redesign can walk out having hired the people who curated it. Design Bank’s own description of itself, a destination antique and furnishing shop working in tandem with interior and landscape design services, captures exactly what separates it from most furniture resellers in the Triangle: it sells the pieces and, for clients who want it, the plan for using them, all from the same address on South Driver Street in Durham.
