One dance hall, two bars, three stages, and a state-of-the-art kitchen define Goode Co. Armadillo Palace at 5015 Kirby Drive in Houston's Rice Village area. Part of the Goode Company restaurant family founded by Jim Goode, the Armadillo Palace is a full-service restaurant and honky-tonk hybrid that combines Texas barbecue traditions, live music, and a dance floor built for two-stepping under hand-painted murals and vintage neon. The kitchen goes well beyond standard bar food: mesquite-smoked re.....

The larger of two halls within the Wortham Theater Center in downtown Houston, the Brown Theater is one of the premier performance spaces in the southern United States. Opened in 1987 and funded substantially through private philanthropy, the Wortham was purpose-built as the home of the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet, and its grand lobby, sweeping staircase and soaring glass facade make it a landmark of the city's Theater District. The Brown Theater seats around two thousand four hu.....

Threaded along the slow, meandering Buffalo Bayou between downtown Houston and the leafy neighbourhood of Memorial Park, Buffalo Bayou Park is one of the most ambitious urban parks built anywhere in the United States this century. The 160-acre linear park, which follows two and a half miles of the bayou through the heart of the city, was reimagined and rebuilt at a cost of more than fifty million dollars in a public-private project completed in October 2015. The transformation turned what had l.....

Within the celebrated Houston Museum of Natural Science in Hermann Park, the Cockrell Butterfly Center is a soaring, three-storey glass-walled rainforest conservatory inhabited by some two thousand free-flying butterflies of around sixty species drawn from rainforests around the world. The centre, which opened in 1994 thanks to a generous gift from the local Cockrell family, is one of the largest tropical butterfly habitats in the United States and a much-loved fixture for visitors to the museum.....

In the Upper Kirby neighbourhood, the Color Factory is an immersive walk-through experience that turns colour itself into the subject of an entire museum. The Houston outpost, which opened in autumn 2022, joined sister venues in New York and other American cities operated by an independent design company that began as a pop-up project before evolving into the polished, ticketed art-experience model that has become a fixture of the immersive-attraction movement. The visit unfolds along a self-pa.....

Halloween night 1950 was opening night for the University of Houston's grand hall, the east wing of an Art Deco administration building designed to give the young university a front door worthy of a city. Cullen Performance Hall at 4800 Calhoun Road occupies the eastern half of the Ezekiel W. Cullen Building, designed by native Houston architect Alfred C. Finn - the man behind the San Jacinto Monument - with long classical wings and regularly spaced pilasters. The building was announced in March.....

The home of Major League Baseball's Houston Astros, Daikin Park is a striking retractable-roof ballpark in the heart of downtown Houston. Opened in 2000 and known over the years by several names, including Enron Field and Minute Maid Park, before taking its current title in 2025, the stadium was a key part of the regeneration of the city's east downtown and incorporates the historic Union Station building into its design. The ballpark seats around forty thousand spectators and is best known for.....

Spread across twelve acres in the heart of downtown Houston, Discovery Green is the city's flagship urban park and a transformative piece of recent civic design. The park opened on 13 April 2008 in what had previously been a sea of surface parking lots opposite the George R. Brown Convention Center, the result of a public-private partnership between the City of Houston and several local foundations that invested more than 125 million dollars in the project. The park is densely programmed for an.....

Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler played their college ball in this building when it was Hofheinz Pavilion, home of the Phi Slama Jama teams that changed basketball. The arena at 3875 Holman Street on the University of Houston campus opened in 1969 and served the Cougars for half a century before a 60-million-dollar transformation - anchored by a 20-million-dollar gift from Houston restaurateur and Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta - rebuilt it from the concourses in. Reopened in December 2018 as t.....

When Hurricane Katrina's evacuees overflowed the Astrodome in 2005, this building absorbed 7,000 of them; twelve years later it sheltered Houston's own during Harvey for 22 straight days, serving a quarter of a million hot meals. The George R. Brown Convention Center, on the east side of downtown Houston at 1001 Avenida de las Americas, is more than a trade hall - it is civic infrastructure in the fullest sense. Opened on 26 September 1987 and named for the engineer-philanthropist who built Bro.....