The residential halls of Adams House (Claverly, Randolph, Westmorly and Old Russell) were originally private "Gold Coast" dormitories built from 1893 to 1902 to provide luxurious accommodation for rich Harvard undergraduates.

appeal[citation needed], Adams was not popular initially; the Victorian era rooms of the Gold Coast buildings seemed dark and "Germanic" to 1930's taste, and many students preferred the entirely up-to-date neo-Colonial structures of Eliot, Winthrop and Dunster Houses.

In fact, some of these same "deficiencies" turned out to be quite handy: students in the 1940s and 1950s wishing to avoid the College's strict nightly curfews and parietal rules came to greatly value Adams' multiple and unguarded entries, unlike the central, monitored portals of the newer undergraduate residences.

Today, such stringent measures are long gone, and the various buildings that comprise Adams House are considered some of the most interesting and architecturally significant structures in the university system.

The House motto, "Alteri Seculo", is taken from Caecilius Statius, as quoted in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations: "He who plants trees labors for the benefit of future generations."

Adams' avant-garde reputation still remains today, protected and promoted by the House's current Faculty Deans, Mercedes Becerra and Salmaan Keshavjee, and embodied in many of the House's unique facilities, including the Pool Theater, a converted swimming pool (a change lamented by alumni mourning the many late night trysts, water polo matches and other quasi illicit activities that were reputed to have occurred there, like coed nude swimming); the recently restored Coolidge Room (the site of artist Edward Penfield's famous murals) and the Gold Room, Adams' gilded vestibule to the world.

Other notable residents include John Brademas, Amy Brenneman, Thomas Lauderdale, Martin Feldstein, Lauren Greenfield, Andre Gregory, Alan Keyes, Bernard Law, Robert Leiken, Donal Logue, Lance Oppenheim, William P. Perry, Alison Rogers, Peter Sellars, Courtney B. Vance, Zaid Al-Rifai, Richard Drayton, William S. Burroughs, Jack Lemmon, Michael Weishan, Claire Saffitz, Jeremy J. Shapiro, John Kerr, and Hudson Yang.

In the 1981 novel Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross, the book's detective Kate Fansler attends a paper on Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi read at a meeting of the Harvard Iambics in the Adams House SCR to attempt to discover 'the state of the English department' after the murder of one of its number.