Is Tucson's Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures Worth a Visit?

During my long weekend trip to Arizona, my mom and I popped over to this Tucson museum on the recommendation of a number of bloggers and Yelp reviewers. Even though I am not particularly interested in doll houses, at $15 a pop, I figured, why not check it out?

The museum has three main rooms: one "Enchanted Realm," one room of antique doll houses, and one "contemporary" collection. There are also always a number of rotating exhibits: at the time of our visit, we got to see a celebration of the world of model railroads, a full-scale model of a British cross street, a car from Jim Roark’s "Metal Monsters" series which looked like a pictaresque pastoral car crash, and these miniature Japanese netsuke carvings, which were initially created 400 years ago as functional fashion accessories and today are just gorgeous works of art.

The Enchanted Realm

The first room has a very eclectic collection of everything charmed, from aliens and Ewoks to Halloween characters and other fictional creations. I enjoyed the creativity of these, even though some of them were a little creepy for my taste!

I particularly enjoyed walking over a "Winter Wonderland" embedded under the floor with a full tiny village covered in snow and gearing up for the holidays. There was also a huge tree in the middle of the room with little windows peaking into different mouse scenes. I really enjoyed walking around and finding the hidden rooms.

The Contemporary Gallery

The contemporary section was by far my favorite part of the experience. There were a lot of different styles and creations, including this amazing scale replica of an actual bookstore - it has more than 1,500 tiny books! This is by artist Annie Herzfeld, who has a number of other impressive creations throughout the gallery. I can't imagine how long and tedious it was to create all those book spines, but it's so impressive how thorough and convincingly to-scale the replica is.

I really enjoyed all of the multi-disciplinary art. These pieces, which were scattered about through the museum, were my favorites to happen upon because of the added work of creating a miniature room and then filling it with miniature art pieces. I don't know if the miniature pottery studio features real pottery, but as for all the other rooms, the artists were essentially combining two art forms.

These miniature models of artist spaces included a pottery studio, a painting studio featuring a monkey painter, a weaver's studio with a mind-boggling number of miniature hand-woven textiles, a super-meta model airplane desk with even smaller model airplanes, and a violin-maker's workshop within the body of a regular-sized violin. There were a lot of miniature paintings throughout the museum, on walls in doll houses, and some on display on their own. That seems like a whole separate skill on its own, although it's hard to really appreciate them without a magnifying glass!

There were a bunch of fancy rooms and boutique shops that looked like places I would enjoy walking into in real life. They were well decorated, and I really enjoyed all the details. You could look at a piece for five minutes and still not see everything going on. Some of the floors were complex "hardwood" designs; in some pieces, the ceilings were decorated; and I especially liked all the tiny light fixtures that actually worked.

A few of the pieces, like the top middle one photographed below, even had hidden "outdoor" spaces with lighting and trees that were visible through windows. I really liked these added details because the artists went above and beyond to make the piece feel a lot more immersive.

I was especially taken by these Japanese buildings because I found the outdoor miniature landscaping really cute. Many of these miniature houses completely ignore the outdoor element, and I really enjoyed the miniature plants and trees. As I said above, it provided context for the buildings and made it feel like more of a complete scene, as opposed to just a floating house. Plus, with these in particular, I obviously appreciated the zen surroundings.

Salavat Fidai Microsculptures

I loved these pencil carvings by Russian artist Salavat Fidai. Seeing that these were on display was the main reason I decided to visit the museum in the first place, since, as I said, the dollhouses didn't appeal to me much.

Fidai carves these "micro-sculptures" out of the lead inside a pencil tip. I had actually seen some sculptures like this before on the internet, but it's hard to appreciate just how small they are until you see them in real life. The amount of precision is amazing, and I love the creativity of sculpting out of such strange objects as Fidai does, including pencils, pumpkin seeds, and grains of rice. I only wish the museum had more of his work - there were only three on display, along with a video of his process.

How long does it take to visit the Mini Time Machine Museum?

All said, I think we were in the museum for about an hour. You could surely spend a little longer, but it's not very big. Also, there is no interactive element for kids (aside from what is available for sale in the gift shop), so I would say two hours is plenty to see the whole museum.

Do I recommend visiting the Mini Time Machine Museum?

This museum appears on every tourist list of things to do in Tucson, Arizona. Now having seen it, I would put the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures on my tier two list of things to do in Tucson. In other words, for me, it's not a must-do if you're only in town for a day, but I do recommend it if you have an hour to kill. I would have been a little disappointed if it had been more expensive or maybe out of the way. But it is quite close to the Tucson Botanical Garden, which I obviously recommend, and tickets are very affordable. If you are into doll houses or crafting or liked any of my photos, I would say you'll probably enjoy visiting this museum and seeing these pieces in person.