A flagship of Houston's reinvented downtown, 713 Music Hall is a purpose-built concert venue carved into POST Houston, the sprawling redevelopment of the city's old Barbara Jordan Post Office. Named in tribute to the city's historic area code, it opened in 2021 as a state-of-the-art room designed to bring major touring artists to the heart of Houston, and it quickly became one of the region's premier mid-to-large live-music destinations. The hall holds around five thousand people and was engine.....

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.....

A 36,000-square-foot brewery north of downtown Houston doubles as a neighbourhood stage. Bad Astronaut Brewing at 1519 Fulton Street, in the Hardy Yards pocket of Near Northside, was founded on a mission statement it prints without irony - brew badass beers and have a damn good time - and the taproom has grown into one of the area's busiest small venues: live music, comedy, punk shows, art markets and community oddities share the calendar with the award-winning house beers. The programming rang.....

A purpose-built concert venue in the heart of downtown Houston, the Bayou Music Center sits within the Bayou Place entertainment complex on Texas Avenue, in the city's lively Theater District. Opened in the late 1990s and operating under several names over the years, it has long served as one of Houston's principal mid-sized rooms for touring music, offering a flexible space that bridges the gap between small clubs and the city's large arenas. The venue is designed for adaptability, with a capa.....

Houston's opera house came in early and under budget - a Texas brag in marble and steel. The Brown Theater is the grand hall of the Wortham Theater Center at 501 Texas Avenue, the 437,000-square-foot downtown arts complex whose 90-foot Romanesque arch and vaulted foyer - adorned with thirty tons of Albert Paley steel sculpture - opened in 1987 four months ahead of schedule and 5 million dollars under its roughly 70-million-dollar budget, financed almost entirely by private donations during Houst.....

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.....