A house built for LAN parties: 12 PCs in the walls, 20 in the engine room

Kenton Varda and Jade Wang did not buy a house with a big basement. They bought an empty lot in Austin, Texas, designed a building around LAN parties and finished it in late 2023. The result, documented at lanparty.house, puts a dozen gaming PCs inside the walls of the basement game room, hides six more stations under the office conference table and keeps twenty identical machines netbooting in a dedicated "engine room".

Built so play can start immediately

The idea of built-in hardware comes from the couple's earlier house in Palo Alto, California. Varda completed a LAN-party-optimised home there in 2011 and it went viral; that design let guests plug their own computers into a station, and almost nobody ever did. With machines already installed, cables routed and one disk image deployed everywhere, a party can start as soon as enough people arrive — and can happen far more often. At one point he was hosting one every other weekend.

The stations fold away when unused, and the game room can be cleared for Dance Dance Revolution, whose pads are set into the floor, for films, VR sessions or workshop projects. In the upstairs office, the conference table opens to reveal six more stations and seats players facing each other.

Inside the infrastructure

Networking runs on Cat6 cabling: 35 wall boxes with four ports each, seven PoE wireless access points, eight PoE security cameras and three PoE intercoms, all UniFi hardware, on a 2 Gbps fibre connection. The game machines were specified in 2023 around an Intel Core i5-13600, 32 GB of RAM and a GeForce RTX 4070. Varda maintains a single disk image for the whole fleet; each machine boots from a shared network drive with a copy-on-write overlay, so a guest's changes vanish at the end of a party and never touch another machine.

What it cost, and who built it

The 22 game machines — monitors, cables and peripherals included — came to roughly $75,000, while the house itself was, in Varda's words, a seven-figure number. The lead architect was his father, Richard Varda, whose work includes the Kingdom Centre in Riyadh and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix; RSP Architects and the contractor Blue Horse Building & Design were also involved. Friends from junior high, with whom Varda has held LAN parties for nearly thirty years, helped assemble the machines and pull cable.

The house also has ordinary parts: children's rooms with cat doors, a catwalk built for cats, two call rooms, guest rooms and a roof deck with a 30-mile view.