A new furniture gallery is opening its doors to customers this weekend at 530 Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh, pairing vintage furniture specialist Evan Bush with interior designer and Raleigh native Kate Anlyan under one roof. The joint venture, called Evan Reid and Yasu Home, fills a street-front space with contemporary art, an upholstery line and a design studio built around vintage pieces.
The pairing came together fast. According to the News & Observer, Bush and Anlyan have known each other for under a year, yet their 4,200-square-foot gallery already includes a main gallery, a corridor nicknamed the Jewel Box, a secondary showroom, a kitchen and Anlyan's office. When the newspaper visited ahead of opening weekend, Anlyan's office was still under construction, a small sign of just how quickly the collaboration has moved from idea to storefront.
The space itself carries history that predates either founder. National Art Interiors, a design firm that operated in the same corner storefront at Glenwood Avenue and Hillsborough Street, opened in 1962 under Pota Vallas, according to WALTER Magazine. Vallas, who arrived in Raleigh from Greece in 1924 at age 16, ran the shop until the mid-1990s — and she happened to be Anlyan's great-aunt. Her husband, George Vallas, had originally acquired the three-story brick building for her design business, per Dignity Memorial, after Pota Vallas had worked for Singer Sewing Company.
A Storefront Steeped In Family History
That lineage isn't just sentimental color — the building itself is a 1915 structure with 10,121 rentable square feet and 14-foot ceilings on the ground floor, according to leasing documents from NAI Tri Properties. The News & Observer's reporting adds that Eugene Robinson worked at National Art Interiors in 1997, another thread tying the current gallery to decades of design work at the same corner.
Inheriting an existing kitchen within the leased layout saved Bush and Anlyan roughly $100,000 in buildout costs, according to Raleigh Magazine. Bush reportedly chose the location for its daytime foot traffic from nearby developments including the AC Hotel and The Casso, the outlet reports. The News & Observer had reported the store's opening in August, and the gallery is now set to welcome customers this weekend, though no formal grand-opening date has been announced.
From Vintage Curation To Custom Upholstery
Bush is a vintage furniture specialist who sources one-of-a-kind pieces from around the world and across centuries, and the new gallery includes mohair upholstered chairs, marble tables and brightly patterned couches. Alongside those restored vintage finds, the flagship marks the business's expansion into custom, made-to-order upholstery designed in collaboration with designer Kim Salmela, per the same Raleigh Magazine report.
“The market here has evolved,” Anlyan told the News & Observer, adding that people are excited to see the value in heirloom-quality pieces. Bush echoed that sentiment to the paper, saying Raleigh has become younger or more affluent and that people are interested in things they were not interested in 20 years ago. The goal, Bush said, is to offer beautiful things whether they challenge or fit a customer's aesthetic.
Anlyan built her own path to interior design over two decades in global fashion retail and textiles before founding Yasu Home in 2021, taking the name from the Greek greeting “Yia sou,” according to Yasu Home. After moving back to North Carolina that year, she purchased and renovated the Raleigh-area childhood home of author David Sedaris and comedian Amy Sedaris, hiring sibling Paul Sedaris to restore its original hardwood floors, as reported by Home Design & Decor Magazine.
Part Of A Bigger Furniture Boom
Evan Reid and Yasu Home differs from the pair's existing warehouse on Old Williamson Road through its contemporary focus downtown, and Bush and Anlyan describe the venture as intended to grow Raleigh's design scene. That warehouse will continue to operate alongside the new storefront.
The Hillsborough Street opening lands amid a broader wave of high-end furniture expansion across Raleigh. Design Within Reach opened a 4,790-square-foot showroom at North Hills, Hoodline previously reported, following Restoration Hardware's 50,000-square-foot Raleigh gallery that opened in 2024. Meanwhile, Trig Modern expanded into a larger venue at Dock 1053 last month, adding a 15-seat jazz cocktail club called Parlour 1053 to draw foot traffic.
Whether street-level retail on Hillsborough Street can sustain high-ticket vintage and custom furniture sales without added food or beverage draws remains to be seen, as does how the downtown gallery's performance will stack up against the Old Williamson Road warehouse operation. For now, Evan Bush and Kate Anlyan are betting that a corner with six decades of design history behind it is ready for a new chapter.
