@chaerui Hi, I currently live in North, so I may be of some help!
North is a pretty cool building to live in and definitely different from other UChicago dorms. First off, it’s HUGE. It’s supposed to house ~800 people, so you have ~100 people in a house. Therefore, it makes it pretty difficult to get to know everyone in your house–I still don’t know everyone and probably haven’t talked to some of them.
Each house has 3 floors and there are 3 buildings to North. The tallest one, with 15 floors, has 4 houses on the 3-14th floors. The 15th floor has reading rooms with beautiful views plus some private study rooms with whiteboards. Another building holds 3? houses (don’t remember off the top of my head) and the other one house.
Every house has a big house lounge that’s right in the center and incorporated into the main stairs of the house. When you get off the elevator, the house lounge is what you see, and then you go either left or right to get to your room–the dorms are in the hallways on either end of the lounge. The lounge is one of the coolest things, IMO, about north and kinda acts as a big “living room” in your three-story “house”. On one of the floors there’s a kitchen with an electric stove, sink, microwave, kettle, fridge, etc. The RH’s usually buy some necessary cooking supplies such as pots and pans, but it’s not a rule that they have to. There are also spaces with TV’s and a study room (I don’t know if this holds true for all houses, this is just how mine is set-up).
Each floor has at least two bathrooms, with at least one being communal. Each communal bathroom has 4 sinks, 4 toilets, and 4 showers, one of which is an accessible toilet and shower. Each house also has at least one private single-user bathroom per floor–mine has two. The house decides which bathrooms are gendered by floor, so if you don’t feel comfortable with your floor’s bathroom being communal, you can privately request it gendered. I haven’t had many complaints about the bathrooms besides the lack of shelving/hooks in the showers (there’s only 1 hook on the wall and that’s it…don’t know if this is common or not in colleges) and at times the smell–some of our bathrooms have a terrible smell to them, most likely from the drainage holes in the floor that haven’t been dealt with.
Each house has a mix of singles, doubles, and apartments at either ends of the hallways. The apartments are for 4 people with single bedrooms, and they’re pretty nice from what I can tell. The regular singles and doubles are 10’x10’ and 10’x20’ respectively. There are also a few super-singles and accessible singles/doubles that are a bit bigger–10’x12’ for a super single. There’s no way to request a super vs. regular room though and it doesn’t even show up on your housing assignment–you find out when you get there. The rooms come with a desk, chair, bed, bookshelves, dresser, and “closet” (a hole in the wall that you have to buy a curtain for). The rooms are carpeted and have air conditioning and heating, but the air conditioning was pretty messed up when we got here–though it was 80F outside, I needed to wear a jacket inside because my room was freezing–there’s no way to regulate the temp in your room since there’s no thermostat. I know some people duct taped their vents because they were so cold. With the heat on it’s way better, though. You use your ID as a key to your door, sliding it into a slot and punching in a code to get into your room. If you want to live in North, do buy a doorstop, because the doors will not stay open by themselves but rather slam shut, so you have to be cautious not to accidentally let the door slam during quiet hours.
The building itself looks pretty cool with lots of glass, including two glass study rooms, but it’s all white so sometimes it reminds me of a hospital. It has study rooms and music practice rooms with tuned pianos on the 2nd floor and laundry rooms + vending machines in the basement.
When you walk out of North, Dollop Coffee is like built into the building, though, it is kinda overpriced I hear, and Baker dining commons a few steps away. In my opinion, baker is a pretty good dining hall and has lots of options, including a pasta station and a dessert station with varieties of scooped ice creams every day. Each house has one long house table, but there are some general public tables along the windows for anyone to use, The staff is really nice as well.
Insomnia cookies also makes heavenly cookies and it’s on 55th street so it’s also a part of north–go there!
The outdoors space is nice with lawn space plus a newly planted tree garden, though the building’s architecture makes it into a sort of wind tunnel, so it can get super windy right by the building, especially under the bridge that connects the tallest building to the rest of north.
If you have any more questions, feel free to message me!
Oh this question is for the singles btw! Thanks and sorry!!!