There are three fridges in the kitchen. Large bins of organic food line the tops of cabinets and under the counter. A dark wooden table occupies half the kitchen, surrounded by a number of mismatched chairs and assorted personalities to match. The walls of the house are as colorful as the people who live there.

An entirely different atmosphere exists within the Brooks Co-op house on Green Street in Urbana. It magnifies a culture separate from that of the University as a whole, as it brings together people from all walks of life. The 14 residents live under one roof and eat five group meals a week. Collectively, they cycle through cooking, cleaning and general housekeeping responsibilities.

Brooks Co-op house is a member of COUCH, or the Community of Urbana Cooperative Housing. The other major co-op house on campus is Harvest House, located on Washington Street in Urbana. The COUCH website, couchcoop.org, also includes La Casa and Greenhouse within the Champaign-Urbana area.

Chessa Kilby, academic employee at the Beckman Institute, and Apoorv Tiwari, graduate student in Engineering, are busy preparing the night’s group dinner.

The menu includes red pepper shrimp pasta, an Indian dish with broccoli, salad and berry cobbler. When the food is ready, around 7 p.m., many of the residents assemble near the counter, serve themselves and sit down at the table to eat and engage in casual conversation.

They cover topics such as the new season of “Breaking Bad” and that one time when the dishwasher overflowed. The group agrees that although it was an incentive to clean the kitchen at the time, it was also a sign to look into buying a less explosion-prone kitchen appliance.

Pratim Patil, who works at Intel near Research Park, is a four-year Brooks resident.

“Here, it’s a diversity of people in terms of the places that they come from (and) the areas of study,” he said.

In contrast, the places he lived while studying at Georgia Tech joined people with similar majors and ethnicities. For Patil, Brooks proved to be a unique and inviting social environment.

“This year especially, it’s been a really good group of people,” said Jeff Parsons, senior in Engineering.

Most of the residents at Brooks are either students at the University or affiliated with it in some way. Many are graduate or doctoral students, and Parsons is an undergraduate. A number of countries are represented at Brooks; there are residents from India, China, Ecuador, Greece and Germany, in addition to other states across the United States.

Day to day, the residents are busy with homework and other projects, so they come and go at their leisure. They still find time to engage in activities outside the house, like outings to bars, a trip to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky and even visits to other co-ops in surrounding states.

To stay at Brooks or the other COUCH houses on campus, each member pays rent according to his or her individual room size and the house’s mortgage and maintenance rates.

“We don’t have a landlord. We are almost our own landlord,” Patil said.

An organization called the North American Students for Cooperation, or NASCO, owns the COUCH houses as well as other co-ops throughout the country. The corporation began in 1968 to imbibe cooperative values and customs through co-op living. 

Several NASCO partnerships similar to COUCH are located on college campuses around the country. Each affiliate includes a number of houses, and many cities have well over 100 co-op members total.

In COUCH, to ensure that the co-op runs smoothly, there are meetings every two weeks, during which the residents create a cooking and chore chart for the following month. 

They also see to any maintenance or housekeeping issues, which are frequent and necessary — especially since the house is about 100 years old. The residents keep track of the repairs to keep Brooks house in working order.

The house itself can easily be described as eccentric and eclectic. Each piece of furniture and structural element has a story behind it — chairs and desks left behind by old members, ornate detailing and unique, timeworn architectural elements.

Before it became a co-op in 2001, at one point the house operated as a shelter for abused women. There is still evidence of this; the door to one of the living rooms is large and heavy, having served as a safety measure in the past.

Brooks house has three stories, plus a basement. It contains 14 bedrooms — one for each member, five shared bathrooms, one and a half kitchens and two living rooms filled with games, couches and a piano.

Since the COUCH members are a tight-knit group, past residents often come back to visit the house and stay for a few nights. Some have lived here for only a year or two, while others have stayed upwards of eight years.

The turnover rate is fairly high. Usually about half the members move out each August, which means that Brooks and other COUCH houses annually welcome new residents.

These cooperative houses on campus serve as more than just a place to live; they promote dialogue, collaboration and joint practices through a community-oriented lifestyle.

Reema can be reached at [email protected].