There is evidence that the health and welfare of young dairy calves may be improved by increasing milk allowance and by providing milk through a teat. These aspects are easily incorporated into automatic milk feeding systems, which promote group housing that has been demonstrated to be important for social development of calves. Little is known about how calves interact with automatic milk feeders (AMF). We investigated the effect of stall design features on calves learning to use the AMF. Sixty-six male and 53 female Holstein calves were enrolled at 4 d of age and introduced to a group pen and trained on an AMF; calves were allowed to suck on a trainer’s fingers and guided to the teat. Calves were allocated to 1 of 2 stall designs: with gated (open) side walls (n = 59), or with solid side walls (n = 60). The hypothesis was that solid stalls would result in a longer latency to approach and feed from the AMF. For a 72-h period after training to the AMF, data from the AMF were collected and calf behavior was monitored by video. Main outcomes measured were latency to first voluntary visit to the feeder, latency to first feeding, time spent in feeder, amount of milk drank, and exploratory behavior such as sniffing and licking of the feeder. Data were analyzed using a mixed-effect linear regression model. The overall latency for calves to first voluntarily drink (without barn staff leading them) from the feeder was 5.3 h greater (P = 0.05; SE = 2.7) with a gated side compared with solid. This voluntary visit differs from if the calf was brought to the feeder for re-training at a 12-h checkpoint to ensure at least 2 L every 12 h. The average time taken to first voluntarily drink was 23.7 h (min = 2.9, max = 69.1) with gated sides and 18.4 h (min = 3.2, max = 54.5) with solid sides. Male calves drank 2.0L more (SE = 1.0; P = 0.05) milk over the 72-h study period than females. Results from this experiment show that simple features of a stall can influence how quickly calves adapt to an AMF. Based on these results, calves adapted to using the AMF quicker when the stall walls were solid versus gated style.