Mews Hall

About Mews Hall

Mews Hall is one of the newest first-year residence halls on North Campus, positioned next to the richly equipped Appel Commons community center. The building has two wings (East and West) with three main residential floors. While Cornell officially classifies Mews as "corridor-style," the rooms are actually arranged in pod-like groups along the hallways. Each pod typically consists of 3 rooms (usually 2 doubles and 1 single, housing about 5 students) that share a single-user, daily-cleaned private bathroom accessible from the hallway. Room numbers reflect this grouping with letter suffixes — for example, rooms 264A, 264B, and 264C form one pod sharing a bathroom. This layout gives Mews a feel that students often describe as "suite-style" while still having the open corridor community atmosphere. The building houses 260+ residents and offers a wide range of programming including trips to the United Nations, a first-year ice skating night, fall and spring BBQs, and weekly study breaks. Mews has AC buildings are temperature-controlled with a thermostat in every room, enabling residents to adjust the temperature within +/- 3 degrees of the general building temperature (not full air conditioning). Rooms 303–332 on the third floor West Wing have LVT flooring; most other rooms are carpeted. Mews Hall is part of the Mews and Loving House community **Building history.** "Mews" is a British architectural term for a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above — historically built for the horses, coachmen, and stable servants of prosperous London residents. Cornell's Mews Hall (opened 2001 as part of the North Campus Residential Initiative) takes its name and inspiration from that arrangement: a courtyard-anchored layout with quarters above and below. **Loving House.** The Loving House LGBTQ+ Living Learning Unit, embedded within Mews, opened in Fall 2019 and is named after *Loving v. Virginia* (1967) — the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. The decision became foundational to civil rights jurisprudence on relationship equality, and the program house adopts the name to signal an intentional residential space for honest dialogue around sex, sexuality, gender identity, queer experience, and cultural competency. Loving House houses about 30 upper-level students drawn from across class years.