Meow Wolf
Santa Fe
Story
The building was a bowling alley. That's not a metaphor — it was literally a bowling alley, sitting vacant on a commercial strip in Santa Fe, until January 2015, when George R. R. Martin pledged $2.7 million to renovate and lease it. Martin handed the keys to a loose collective of punk artists who had been staging guerrilla installations around New Mexico since February 2008, when founders Sean Di Ianni, Matt King, Corvas Brinkerhoff, Emily Montoya, Caity Kennedy, Benji Geary, and Vince Kadlubek drew the collective's name by pulling two random words from a hat. That name — Meow Wolf — stuck, and so did the ambition.
House of Eternal Return opened March 18, 2016, built by 135 artists working inside 20,000 square feet of former lanes and pin machinery. The experience they built — a Victorian house whose rooms open into impossible dimensions, bioluminescent caverns, glowing portals, a narrative mystery threaded through every drawer and mail slot — became something the art world hadn't quite seen before. The Themed Entertainment Association gave it a Thea Award in 2017. The New York Times Magazine asked whether it could become "the Disney of the experience economy."
What makes Santa Fe's House of Eternal Return distinct from every Meow Wolf location that followed is its origin: it carries the particular wildness of a collective that had nothing to lose and no template to follow. The bowling alley shell still exists outside. The chaos inside is entirely earned.
What to Spot
The exterior of the building retains the low, flat-roofed silhouette and wide commercial facade of its former life as a bowling alley — a deliberately unremarkable shell that gives no indication of the scale or strangeness waiting inside.
Bonus Finds
- The collective's name came from a random draw at the very first meeting in 2008 — every person present wrote two words on scraps of paper and dropped them into a hat. 'Meow' and 'Wolf' won. The founding seven included artists, musicians, and organizers who described themselves at the time as 'a community of punk, quirky, artistic pals.'
- George R. R. Martin's involvement goes beyond the funding check — he has remained a visible Santa Fe figure and advocate for the project, his $2.7 million pledge supplemented by $50,000 from the city of Santa Fe and $100,000 raised through crowdfunding.
- The Omega Mart concept that became a 52,000-square-foot Las Vegas anchor in 2021 started as a temporary Santa Fe installation in 2012, when the collective's youth education arm CHIMERA worked with roughly a thousand local students to build a fictitious grocery store stocked with satirical goods.
- Multiple musicians have filmed music videos inside House of Eternal Return, among them The Revivalists and T-Pain — the Victorian house and its branching impossible rooms functioning as a kind of standing set that rewards repeated visual exploration.
Share your finds and tag us — @scavtopia.
Plan your visit
Scavtopia turns this place — and any place — into an adventure. Join the waitlist.
Photo: Parker Higgins / CC BY-SA 4.0