Taos Inn

The Taos Inn occupies a complex of historic adobe buildings on Paseo del Pueblo Norte at the north edge of the Taos plaza district. The core of the property comprises several nineteenth-century adobe residences that were combined and adapted to hotel use in the 1930s, when Helen Martin organized the renovation that established the Taos Inn as a public lodging house.

The buildings are vernacular and Pueblo Revival adobe construction. Original walls of coursed adobe survive at the cores of the older houses, finished in mud and stucco plaster and carried by vigas of pine. The 1930s adaptation combined the separate residences around an enclosed courtyard, with a covered well at the center that gives the lobby its distinctive character. Pueblo Revival details, including projecting vigas, recessed window openings with deep adobe reveals, carved corbels, plank doors with hand-forged hardware, and corner kiva fireplaces, were added during the conversion to align the property with the broader regional style then being promoted in northern New Mexico.

The Taos Inn opened to the public in 1936 and became a meeting place for the Taos art colony, the writers and painters who circulated through northern New Mexico during the mid-twentieth century. Doc Martin's restaurant, occupying the original residence of Thomas Paul Martin, the town's first physician, takes its name from that original use. The inn has operated continuously as a hotel since its conversion.

The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 in recognition of its architectural and cultural significance. It remains in operation as a hotel and restaurant. Within the broader adobe tradition of New Mexico, the Taos Inn stands as a successful adaptive use that preserved nineteenth-century Hispano adobe residential fabric within a twentieth-century Pueblo Revival hospitality envelope, capturing the moment when Taos's adobe vernacular was consciously reframed as the architecture of an arts and tourism economy.