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Main Common Room

The gracious Main Common Room, originally the dining hall, is used for receptions, lectures, conferences, concerts, and all kinds of get-togethers from fireside chats to leadership dinners.

Its features include a high vaulted roof, Australian cedar paneling and a carved
mantle-piece over a wide-open functioning fireplace.
   
In August 1896 the first College Principal Louisa Macdonald wrote to her friend Eleanor Grove:

The casts of the Parthenon frieze arrived this week and are now hung up in the dining hall - where they are a perpetual joy to me, and I think to the students too.

These distinctive decorative features represent the Panathenaic procession from the originals in the British Museum.