Norris House

Norris House is an event space on North Blount Street in downtown Raleigh, in a house built in 1879 as a wedding gift for Cornelia Alice Norris and Matthew Tyson Norris. In its day it was one of the jewels of that street and hosted plenty of fashionable events.

The house went through a long stretch of unkind changes before a recent restoration brought it back. It now takes private and corporate parties, in rooms that look much closer to the original than they did for most of the last century.

What to know

• Later owners turned the house into a boarding house and removed the original Italianate front.
• Much of the interior trim was stripped out, and all but one fireplace was lost.
• The State of North Carolina bought the house in the 1970s and used it as an office building.
• Restoration work began in 2016 and finished in May 2018.
• The rebuilt front was designed from historical records and the original masonry foundation, unearthed in 2017.