House of Eternal Return

Chill forest Stephen/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

When George R. R. Martin buys a vacant bowling alley in an industrial neighborhood in Santa Fe and leases it out to a 135-member group of artists known for creating elaborate interactive art installations, you can assume that the result will be pretty spectacular. Such is the case with the House of Eternal Return.

The first permanent installation created by the Meow Wolf art collective, House of Eternal Return, consists of 20,000 square feet of fully explorable space centered around a full-size reproduction of a two-story Victorian house that harbors a secret. According to the backstory provided to visitors, the house was once inhabited by the Selig family, but then “something happened” that led to the family’s disappearance and apparently warped the nature of time and space.

Visitors are turned loose to piece together the non-linear narrative on their own, rifling through the clothes, furnishings, books, and personal papers of the family members and stumbling through cosmic portals hidden throughout the house. House of Eternal Return has a total of 70 distinct interconnected spaces including (but not limited to) enchanted forest tree houses, a tiny Old West ranch powered by hamsters, luminescent caves, space-age corridors, mastodon skeleton xylophones, laser harps, and the study where Grandpa Selig labored to unravel a mind-boggling conspiracy of interdimensional proportions.

The space also includes a music venue called Fancy Town, and Chimera, a non-profit center that offers classes to children. Summer camps, after school programs, and internships are all offered on-site.

Know Before You Go

Open daily (except Tuesdays) with late-night admission Friday and Saturday. Be sure to give yourself at least a couple of hours to explore the space at a relaxed pace! If you arrive an hour before close, tickets are discounted, but it's better seen at a slower pace.

Ticketing online is highly recommended. A limited number of people are admitted at a time, so the facility does not become too crowded. That means you can wait in line for hours, especially in the summer heat, and may not be able to get in at all or without sufficient time to explore the installation. Making an online reservation allows you to pick an available time of your choice, and the wait when you arrive is far shorter than general admission.

There are a gift store and a small cafe on site.