Adams Keeps Up Gold Coast Luxury In Architecture, Food, Activities, Rules

Adams House has been repeatedly characterized as the last green glow in the rapidly petrifying forest of gracious living. And those who so characterize it refer to some of these points:

Architecturally, Adams includes two fragments of that vanished land, the Gold Coast, where the walls are dark with oak paneling, the windows small and leaded, the bathtubs crouch on scaley clawed feet, and the square swimming pool steams with the mosiac erudition of Xanadu.

Activities include such opportunities for the slipper-and-lounging-jacket set as a Wine Sippers' Society and a Cheese Tasters' Guild.

Society remains discretely polite since Ladies are not passed, like machine-washed glasses, under the ultra-violet eyes of a House Superintendent. Instead, their presence is recorded on small white cards to be deposited in little boxes on the entry walls which, howbeit, look little like silver trays.

The uncentral kitchen gets closer by several minutes to the three minute egg than most other dining halls and the food in general keeps ahead of the College standard.

The superior food bakes an indirect but most valuable contribution: the dining hall is not a place to be fled as soon as the worm is pacified, with the result that tutors, resident and otherwise, are usually present and usually sit in on lengthy conversations with members of the House.

To these grand remnants of luxury, Adams adds more modern inventions: the good and active Music Society, the relatively high percentage of Group I students, the ambitious dramatic group, the small but struggling Discussion and Writing Groups, the Library with its strongpoints--English, History, Economics, Government--and even the washing machines in the basement of C-Entry.

All of these things function as advertised. Yet the existence of the Wine Sippers adds little to the lives of beer drinkers; claw--feet do little to reconcile a bath-tub to one desiring a shower; the dining hall, however much better than the rest, still must cook on a budget, which contributes some of the evils of the Central Kitchen; the high-powered brains are of little general utility; the English collection's excellence is of little use to science concentrators, the washing machines are insignificant if one wants clothes ironed.

Which is to say more than that these attractions are valuable only to those who prefer them; it is to say that they function as fragments, typifying simultaneously the House's individual spirit and wide range of interests.

Take It or Leave It

Rooms available in Adams next year include: three single ($115); 18 doubles ($130-195); 28 triples ($100-205); 6 quadruples ($105-195); 3 quintuples ($105-140).