Bowles Hall is a residence hall unlike any other at UC Berkeley — a gorgeous Tudor mansion nestled just next to the football stadium in the hills above campus. Despite the building’s castle-like facade, for many years it settled into genteel disrepair, an all-male dorm that was out of favor with students and unaffordable for campus upkeep. The dorm is now an alums-funded residential college, where students can live, eat and study for the entirety of their collegiate experiences. Hundreds gathered Saturday to celebrate the reopening, with alumni spanning the building’s history returning to campus to witness the return of the residential college’s legacy. On a campus where students typically move off campus after one year in the dorms, the new Bowles Hall offers the antithesis of the typical Berkeley experience: a four-year, all-inclusive academic environment where students learn, eat and grow in a single residence hall their entire collegiate life. Bowles residents from the 1960s remember the dorm for its tight-knit community and lively spirit, fostered by the residence hall’s all-inclusive nature. Fred Strauss, class of ’70, recalled an annual luau in the building’s front yard, with students converting the lawn into a makeshift pool and building an elaborate waterfall from the building’s seventh-floor balcony. Warren Nordgren, class of ’62, remembered dropping water balloons on students returning home from final exams, and stringing a phone line between Bowles and an all-female dorm, Stern Hall. The dorm risked full-on closure when the Haas School of Business attempted to acquire the property and use it as a home for the school’s school’s executive education center, a nondegree program that offers training for companies. Bowles was closed for the 2015-2016 school year, while it underwent complete renovation, including returning a dining hall to the building and completely remaking the student housing.