Founded in 1910 by American industrialist L. L. Nunn, the house grants room and board scholarships to a number of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members affiliated with the university's various colleges and programs.

[2][7] The house's initial purpose, as described by Cornell historian Morris Bishop was "to grant [the students] release from all material concern, a background of culture, the responsibility of managing their own household, and the opportunity to live and learn from resident faculty members and eminent visitors [to the university]".

Notable residents include theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson,[19] British Jamaican artist and art historian Petrine Archer-Straw, classicist Martin Bernal,[20] physicist Carl M. Bender, philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom,[21] Nobel laureate in Physics Sir William Lawrence Bragg who resided in the house as a visiting professor,[22] former United States Congressman and President of the World Bank Barber Conable,[17] author Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt,[23] Nigerian academic Michael Echeruo, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics Richard Feynman,[24] political scientist and political economist Francis Fukuyama,[25] American political theorist William Galston, multiple Tony- winning director and producer and founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum Gordon Davidson, British philosopher Paul Grice,[26] UCLA philosopher Barbara Herman,[26] author and diplomat William vanden Heuvel,[27] conservative politician and diplomat Alan Keyes,[21] Ukrainian writer Sana Krasikov,[28] European intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra,[29] former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold O.

Levy, University of Maryland, College Park president Wallace Loh,[30] NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel,[31] chemist, peace activist and Nobel Chemistry and Peace Prize laureate Linus Pauling,[32] American classical musician Martin Pearlman, United States Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to the U.S.

Cabinet Frances Perkins,[15] historian Kenneth Pomeranz,[33] Cornell philosopher, dean and vice-president George Holland Sabine, gender and queer studies theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,[34] American anthropologist Clare Selgin Wolfowitz,[35] political scientist Stephen Sestanovich,[21] political scientist Abram Shulsky,[25] political theorist Joseph M. Schwartz,[36] literary theorist and postcolonial and gender studies scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,[14] lawyer, legal scholar and former Dean of Stanford Law School Kathleen Sullivan,[37] Czech economist and politician Jan Švejnar,[38] theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics Steven Weinberg,[4] Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, World Bank president, diplomat and academic Paul Wolfowitz,[21] journalist and writer William T. Vollmann,[39] and biophysicist and virologist Robley C. Williams.

The Telluride House has been variously described as an organization "so peculiar in purpose and practice",[40] an "unusually rich and intense academic experience",[3] and an "intellectual non-fraternity",[34] where residents gather "over dinner to discuss popular culture, history, civil life, or scientific advances.

[41] That the house was home to so many neoconservatives in the 1970s has led to it being dubbed "a designated breeding ground for conservative intellectuals in their larval state".

In an interview he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains".

As a result, the Telluride House was reportedly "a strongly masculine environment", and "proved a rich vein of experience for Sedgwick to mine in her explorations of homosociality",[34] a term she popularized.

Unlike Perkins and Feynman, writer William T. Vollmann had an unfavourable view of house life and his experiences there in the early 1980s.