Snow Building

The Snow Building, completed in 1930 at 331 West Main Street (the property occupies 331-335 W Main), was designed by prominent Durham architect George Watts Carr Sr. with George W. Kane serving as general contractor. The building is considered, alongside the Kress Building at 101 West Main, to be one of Durham's two most elaborate Art Deco buildings. Its design combines masonry-and-steel-frame construction with Gothic Revival-style pilasters, a spiked roofline, and a recessed entryway set in a Deco-Gothic frame.

According to family records shared on Open Durham, the building was developed by Anna Exum Snow during the 1930s; her family's land holdings, gifted to her as a wedding present, eventually became downtown Durham property on which she had this office building constructed. The building originally housed multiple offices and first-floor retail spaces. Historical photographs from 1963 show a jewelry store occupying the first-floor retail space.

The Snow Building rises seven floors above ground and houses approximately 25,678 square feet of office, retail, and restaurant space across six floors plus a rooftop penthouse apartment. The lobby retains its original manually-operated elevators, which remain functional. The building continues to operate today as a working downtown commercial address, with office tenants on the upper floors, ground-floor retail and restaurant tenants, and a residential penthouse.

The Snow Building sits in Durham's Five Points area between downtown's commercial core and the historic Duke Factory district, and it is regarded as a contributing property within the downtown Durham historic-architecture inventory.