After closing its Catherwood Road location in June, K-HOUSE Karaoke & Arts Hub reopened its doors on Tuesday at 121 West Martin Luther King Jr. St. in the Ithaca Commons.
With its move, K-HOUSE is shifting from its private karaoke suite model to an expanded setting that offers a cafe, two bars and a live music venue. The space hosts daily karaoke, open mics and workshops, and visitors can book private karaoke events at partner venues in town through the business’s new “Pop-Up Club,” according to owner Alina Kim ’03.
Kim opened K-HOUSE in 2014 at 15 Catherwood Rd. Kim told The Sun that her sister first gave her the idea to open up a karaoke business in Ithaca, thinking locals would be “accepting” of a new karaoke style.
Ithaca was already “very into karaoke culture from an American standpoint,” Kim said, and K-HOUSE combined the existing culture with the “more Asian [style] of private karaoke suite[s].” The Catherwood Road location closed in June due to unresolved mold and structural issues.
With less square footage than its previous location, K-HOUSE can no longer host private karaoke suites, according to Kim. The new space at the historic Exchange Building was home to The Watershed and The Downstairs for nearly a decade, until the joint bar and music venues closed at the end of December.
The building’s two floors are split into separate bars, with the upstairs, called K-HOUSE Bar & Lounge, hosting traditional karaoke and the downstairs, called Room K, serving as a performance venue. Room K plans to host a new “designated queer space” called Q Space on certain days, Kim said. Local kitchen Farm to Feast will serve food during the daytime in the upstairs area.
By including performance art, community events and food concepts, Kim said the business is stepping out of its traditional karaoke-only service. K-HOUSE has outfitted several locations for its Pop-Up Club, implementing the same karaoke systems the original private suites had.
“Now that we don't have the private karaoke suites onsite with our karaoke bar and lounge, we decided to take almost like an Airbnb approach, but a little bit more community driven,” Kim said. “[We are] taking existing event spaces and then helping them bring in more revenue, … more recognition and [the] opportunity to do pop-up events.”
On Friday, the first member of the Pop-Up Club, MIX Art Gallery, will launch an open house and host karaoke parties of up to 20 people.
Q Space
Room K is home to Q Space from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Monday through Wednesday, Kim said.
Q Space will offer activities like craft workshops and guest speakers on Tuesdays, and will serve as a stomping grounds for the local LGBTQ+ community to hang out and work on Mondays and Wednesdays, Kim said.
Local drag artists Just Alex, a Ph.D. candidate in music, and Tilia Cordata run Q Space. Currently, Just Alex said the two are looking for community input to see what people want or can contribute to the space.
In March, Q Space will hold “Generative Creative Writing Workshops” twice a month, led by Jess Franken, a local essayist, poet, editor and teacher. Several local creatives have also already reached out about hosting art workshops and exercise classes in the future, Just Alex told The Sun.
Visitors to the space have the option of donating based on a “pay what you can system,” Just Alex said. Additionally, Just Alex is helping run nighttime programming through a monthly “Sunday Fungay” event, which will include karaoke and queer trivia.
“You can just come hang out and be with people, and people are excited about that,” Just Alex said. “We're excited that people are interested in sharing their skills, too, with other folks. It looks like [there is a] gap that we might be filling, which is great.”
Farm to Feast
Farm to Feast, owned by chefs Mary Buell and Jason Windsor, will serve food in a daytime cafe at K-HOUSE from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Wednesday to Sunday. The bar and lounge is open from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily, except for the first and third Sunday of the month — on these particular Sundays, the venue will host live performances by Irish folk band Traonach, followed by karaoke at 6 p.m.
Buell and Windsor operate Farm to Feast off their 2.5 acre farm in upstate New York. They started the business, which their website describes as “rooted in curiosity, connection, flavor and respect for the land,” in April 2025.
Since then, they joined Shared Kitchen Ithaca and set up a food stand at the Ithaca ReUse Center — where they sell tacos, kebabs and more — and sell their signature shokupan, a pillowy Japanese milk bread, and ramen broth at GreenStar, according to Windsor.
The pair met Kim at an event downtown in Press Bay Alley, and Farm to Feast has been preparing for their opening at K-HOUSE ever since. Buell said they plan to serve breakfast sandwiches and pastries in the morning, sandwiches and ramen during lunchtime and, once they hire more people, late night snacks in the evening.
“We'd really like to have the place be kind of [a] workspace vibe as well, so people can hang out with a coffee and a pastry, or they can sit down with four friends and get a full lunch or breakfast,” Buell said.
At the previous K-HOUSE location, Kim said they hosted several pop-up kitchens with similar facilities.
“We referred to [the previous location’s kitchen] as the K-HOUSE tiny kitchen, just because it was almost the size of a food truck inside a small room,” Kim said. “And it's similar here in that there's a lot that could be done in a small space.”
“An Art Hub”
According to its website, K-HOUSE is open to patrons of all ages before 8 p.m., pitching itself as an environment where young people can “respectfully engage with live performance, understand venue etiquette and experience the joy of creative expression.” After 8 p.m., the space is generally reserved for guests ages 21 and up.
Belle Garnett ’26, music director for the Callbaxx a cappella group at Cornell, said she visited the business several times at its Catherwood Road location. Each time, she went to attend a social event for her a cappella group.
Setting up a reservation with K-HOUSE was relatively easy, she said, but traveling to the location was sometimes difficult. Garnett said the Commons is “a much better location for them.”
“I think a karaoke bar is a great business to have in a college town, especially one like Ithaca that has a huge a cappella community at Cornell and a strong music program at Ithaca College,” Garnett said.
Garnett told The Sun she looks forward to planning more social events for the Callbaxx at the new K-HOUSE location.
When K-HOUSE closed, Kim said she was unsure about the future of her career, and she didn't know if the business would be considered "desirable" enough to come back. She hopes that K-HOUSE can once again find a home in the community and become a performance, art and music hub for Ithacans.
“We're really hoping that people like us or love us enough to help us continue to keep this legacy of karaoke and performance and art and music going in this community,” Kim said. “And now, with this space, I really hope that we could magnify it and really become an art hub where we see all kinds of original and creative processes flow through.”
Shubha Gautam is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at sgautam@cornellsun.com.
