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Arts & Entertainment

Mysterious 'Instagram museum' offers sugar rush to Dallas neighborhood

Please, don't eat that doughnut. You can look at it. Touch it. Take a picture of it. Buy it, even.

But don't eat it.

That's the saccharine secret at Sweet Tooth Hotel: You can look and you can touch. But delicious as it may seem, don't take a bite. You'll have to satisfy your cravings another way.

Sweet Tooth Hotel will be brimming with colorful candy installations when it opens in Dallas...
Sweet Tooth Hotel will be brimming with colorful candy installations when it opens in Dallas in May 2018. Cole Keeton is one of two creators of the exhibit.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Sweet Tooth Hotel will be an elusive addition to Dallas' Victory Park when it pops up in a vacant storefront May 18 through June 30. It's a hotel, wink wink, that will feature decadently designed rooms you can traipse through after checking in at the front desk. Pay a little extra and you'll get a special key that unlocks "surprises," says co-founder Jencey Keeton.

Sweet Tooth Hotel is a pop-up art installation — an Instagram museum, you could call it — bursting with flavor. It's a game, too, where "there are going to be different levels of how you experience it," says Keeton, who created the installation with her husband, Cole Keeton.

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"What is Dallas going to do with this?" its creators ask.

The hotel isn't built yet, so the answer is one giant question mark ... cloaked in millennial pink and glitter. Jencey is the right person for the job, though: She loves sweets so much that her friends call her Cakeface.

Jencey Keeton, whose nickname is "Cakeface," is the co-creator of Sweet Tooth Hotel in Dallas.
Jencey Keeton, whose nickname is "Cakeface," is the co-creator of Sweet Tooth Hotel in Dallas.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

The faux hotel will include one room featuring a giant Ring Pop, another with colorful macarons. In all, Sweet Tooth Hotel will have five dessert-themed rooms.

Attendees can visit the rooms by the hour, wink wink; customers will traipse around the pop-up hotel in a choose-your-own-adventure manner.

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Actors will serve as bell hops and concierges, seemingly convinced they're operating inside a present-day Willy Wonka hotel. Local artists will create mouthwatering (but inedible) pieces, such as some unconventional seating in the doughnut room from Jojo Chuang and giant, metallic gold lips by Jeremy Biggers. The Keetons are fronting the costs of the exhibit; ticket sales go, in part, toward compensating artists.

A bedroom in the hotel will be an eye-popping pink — "with a bite," Jencey says.

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While the installation is the Keetons' idea, each room is being designed by Built By Bender, a fabrication shop owned by three Dallas brothers. Jencey calls them "the mad scientists" of the project.

Sweet Tooth Hotel is Dallas' version of an immersive, experiential art exhibit mirrored from popular installations like Sleep No More, a fictional hotel in New York City. Jencey is also interested in Sweet Tooth Hotel's potential ability to increase traffic in Victory Park, an area of Dallas that will be home to more than a half-dozen new restaurants in mid-2018.

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So while Sweet Tooth Hotel is aimed at millennials and their iPhones, it serves another purpose: It'll offer Victory Park a sugar rush.

Tickets go on sale Jan. 18 and will cost $20 per person (free for children under 2); or $40 for a special keyholder ticket. Check-ins are once an hour, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. May 18 through June 30. Private event rates are available at 9 p.m. daily. Anyone curious about the Sweet Tooth Hotel will be able to shop the Gift Shoppe, a free area that will sell goods from collaborating companies including Joy Macarons, Leatherology and more. If you like what you see, every piece of art will be for sale.

The Sweet Tooth Hotel will be at 2316 Victory Park Lane in Dallas.

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