Houston Destination Guide

The Great Museums Nobody Plans a Trip Around

Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States and the least understood. It exists because of energy and medicine, with the largest medical complex in the world sitting a few miles from downtown and a global oil and gas business running much of its calendar through here. What visitors do not expect is the art. The Menil Collection, given to the city by the de Menil family and housed in a Renzo Piano building among bungalows in Montrose, is one of the great museum experiences anywhere, free to enter, with the Rothko Chapel and the Cy Twombly Gallery on the same quiet campus. The Museum of Fine Arts a few blocks away is genuinely major. So is the food, which may be the most interesting in the country.

The planning decision: whether the work trip earns a weekend

Most travel to Houston starts as business, and the real decision is whether you attach two days to it. The answer is almost always yes, because the museum district and the restaurants reward a proper visit and cost you nothing in travel time. The second decision is the airport. George Bush Intercontinental sits north of the city, handles the international flights and runs about forty minutes to downtown outside rush hour. William P. Hobby sits south, is closer to downtown and the medical center at roughly twenty five minutes, and suits domestic itineraries. Where your meetings are should decide both the airport and the neighborhood.

The humidity, and the months that are actually pleasant

Late October through April is the comfortable window, and the winter here is mild, green and genuinely nice. Spring is beautiful and short. From May into September the heat is compounded by humidity that is different in kind from the dry heat further west and much harder to walk in, and the middle of the day belongs indoors. The Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November and peaks from August into October. Houston also floods, and it does so after heavy rain rather than only during named storms, so travel in those months warrants flexible terms and proper insurance rather than optimism.

Where to base, and how the city is actually laid out

Houston is enormous and low rise, and it has several centers rather than one. Downtown holds the theater district and much of the corporate business. Uptown, around the Galleria, is the shopping and hotel concentration on the west side. Montrose and the Museum District are the best base for a leisure weekend, walkable in patches, full of restaurants and within minutes of the Menil. River Oaks is the grand residential quarter between them, and the Heights to the north has the bungalows and the newer kitchens. A car or a driver is assumed here, and traffic on the loops is serious at commute hours.

Stay strategy across a market built for business

The Post Oak Hotel in Uptown is the flagship and the room the city uses to impress people. Hotel Granduca, also in Uptown, is smaller and styled as an Italian villa, and is the quieter choice. Four Seasons Hotel Houston sits downtown and works well for meetings and for the theaters. The Lancaster is the historic room in the theater district. La Colombe d'Or, a mansion turned small hotel in Montrose, is the right base if you came for the art, since the Menil is a short walk away. Rates soften on weekends here, which is the opposite of most leisure cities.

When to begin

Two to three months for a typical trip. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo occupies late February and most of March and fills the city for three weeks, and the large energy and medical conventions do the same at intervals through the year, so those dates want six months or more and firm terms. Corporate blocks should start a year ahead. Restaurants are easier than the food reputation suggests with two or three weeks of notice, though the handful of rooms everyone wants still go early on weekends.

Four experiences worth building the days around

• A slow morning on the Menil campus, taking the collection, the Rothko Chapel and the Twombly Gallery on foot and in that order, then lunch in Montrose.
• Space Center Houston and the tram tour through the Johnson Space Center, given a full day and booked ahead in the busy months.
• An eating day across the city's immigrant kitchens, from the Vietnamese restaurants along Bellaire Boulevard to the Indian and Nigerian rooms on Hillcroft.
• An evening in the theater district, which supports resident opera, ballet, symphony and theater companies in a way very few American cities manage.

Who this trip suits

Houston suits business travelers, who make up most of its visitors and are well served. It suits art travelers more than they realize, and food travelers without reservation. It suits families, given the space center, the natural science museum and the zoo. It suits medical travelers and the people accompanying them, which is a real and underserved category here. And it suits anyone curious about what the most diverse city in America actually eats.

When another plan may fit better

If you want a compact city you can walk end to end, this is not it, and Charleston will suit you far better. If you need a straightforward corporate base with the biggest airport and the shorter distances, Dallas is simpler. And anyone traveling between June and September should be clear eyed about the humidity and the storm exposure before committing to non refundable arrangements.

Plan it with one accountable advisor

Tell us where the meetings or the medical appointments sit and we will place you so the driving works, then build the museums, the tables and the space center into the days around them. Our corporate travel management covers conference and recurring business travel, and our luxury leisure travel planning handles the weekend on either side.