The guest rooms at the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, were designed to resemble tipis.
The Holbrook property is one of the surviving Wigwam Motels, a roadside lodging concept built around individual concrete rooms shaped like Native American tipis. Its distinctive design made the motel easy for motorists to recognize and helped define the novelty architecture associated with mid-century Route 66 travel.
The Holbrook location is commonly identified as Wigwam Motel Village No. 6. It opened in 1950 and remains one of the best-known roadside attractions in Arizona. Each room is a separate structure rather than a conventional hotel room inside a long building.
The motel’s design is sometimes casually called a “teepee,” but “tipi” is the preferred spelling for the traditional conical dwelling associated with several Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. The Wigwam rooms are modern concrete structures inspired by that form, not historic Indigenous dwellings.