LAN Party House

We built our house for LAN parties This is our basement game room. 12 PCs are built into the walls. Game Stations These fold up nicely when not in use. Closed station Open station Dance Dance Revolution There are DDR pads in the floor. The Upstairs Office We can game here too. Board games are games, right? Computer Mode The table also transforms to reveal six more game stations. Two sit-stand desks in the back are our personal workstations. (But that's not me in the seat. That's Lester.) Cable Management Video and USB cables pass into conduits... Which eventually lead to... The Engine Room 20 identical game machines. All game machines netboot from a shared disk image on this server. Our personal desktops Dedicated A/C intakes from behind the machines and supplies cold air here. Door leads to the "hot side". The "Hot Side" It's actually not that hot. Networking Lots of cat6: 35 wall boxes with 4 ports each 7 PoE WAPs 8 PoE security cameras 3 PoE intercoms All network equipment and cameras are UniFi. Egads! This photo has made a lot of network engineers angry! Response in the Q&A. 2 Gbps fiber internet Components This is the hardware before it went into the machines. (Note: This was in 2023.) Intel Core i5-13600 32GB RAM GeForce RTX 4070 An insanely unstable motherboard with 10G ethernet on-board. Don't buy this. :( Assembly My (Kenton's) friends from junior high helped assemble the machines and pull the cables. We've been doing LAN parties together for nearly 30 years. Lester Jesse Peter Kenton Living Room This house has normal parts, too! Catwalk (Same room as above, after rotating right.) These shelves are designed for cats to climb. Cat doors lead into kids' bedrooms. Kids' Rooms Beds are lofted. Hallway to other kid's loft. (With lockable door.) Cat door from living room. 6' closet below loft. Cable conduit to engine room. (For future computer desks, when they're older.) The other kid's room is a mirror image of this. Call Rooms Two call rooms allow taking meetings without bothering other people. Of course, they are also game stations. Cat Restrooms Exhaust fans Cat doors allow cats access to bedrooms when human doors are closed. Space under stairwells is dedicated to cat litter boxes. Guest Rooms We have two guest rooms for out-of-town visitors. The Roof Deck My favorite part of the house. 30-mile view Misting fan, great in the heat! Cat Cat Q&A About Us Whose house is this? We are Kenton Varda and Jade Wang. We've been married since 2014. This is our house, where we live with our two kids, in Austin, Texas. Kenton is a software engineer. He: Started and is tech lead of the Cloudflare Workers serverless compute platform. Co-founded Sandstorm.io (with Jade) Created Cap'n Proto Long ago, led the original open source release of Google's Protocol Buffers. Is: [email protected] GitHub: @kentonv Hacker News: kentonv Bluesky: @kentonvarda.com Twitter: @KentonVarda Discord: kentonv Jade is an entrepreneur. She: Holds a PhD in neuroscience and did research at NASA Co-founded the Chez JJ hacker house network Co-founded Sandstorm.io (with Kenton) Was Head of Startups at Cloudflare Advises and invests in startups, particularly in Austin Was once a concert pianist Is: [email protected] GitHub: @jadeqwang Hacker News: qiqing Bluesky: @jadewang.me Twitter: @qiqing Discord: qiqing Who designed and built it? We bought the property as an empty lot and designed and built the house from scratch. The lead architect was Richard Varda, Kenton's father. Rich is an accomplished architect who has designed everything from houses to skyscrapers. Among other things, he designed The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Rich was also VP of Architecture at Target for many years. Many features of the house were designed directly by Kenton and Jade. For example, Kenton designed the game station cabinetry, office conference table, cat shelves, conduit routing, and most technical features of the house. Additionally, we worked with Thom Lasley and others at RSP Architects. RSP normally does commercial buildings, not houses, but Rich was working with RSP on other projects at the time and had known Thom for decades, so it made sense. Blue Horse Building & Design was our general contractor who built the house. When was it built? The house was completed in late 2023. We originally bought the property in 2019, and began construction in mid-2021. Yeah, it took a while. Who made this site? This site was designed and coded by Kenton with photos taken by Kenton, Jade, and Rich. We are neither web designers nor photographers. That's why the design is weird and the photos are kinda meh. Nothing on this site is sponsored. Didn't someone else do this already? Like a decade ago? Yes, someone did. Specifically, me (Kenton)! In 2011 I completed a LAN-party optimized house in Palo Alto, California, and it went viral. It, too, was in collaboration with my father (but I had not yet met Jade). But contrary to what most people think upon seeing the pictures, the original LAN house was not very big: 1400 sqft. This made for a pretty awesome bachelor pad, but would have been a bit cramped for raising a family. The new house is much, much better. I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know! Why did you move to Austin? In 2019, my team at Cloudflare was growing. But, most of the hiring was happening in the Austin office, while I worked from San Francisco. Meanwhile, with our first child on the way, Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto. I suggested to Jade: Should we move to Austin? Jade initially said no, because she wanted our kids to benefit from Palo Alto's school district. At the time, it was rated #12 in the nation. But, looking closer at the rankings revealed a surprise: The Eanes school district in Austin was #8. When I showed this to Jade, she changed her mind. Ironically, just after we moved, covid hit, and Cloudflare became 100% remote. The original reason for the move—being closer to my team—became moot. In retrospect, we could have gone anywhere! Not that there's anywhere in particular that I think would have been better. It's just funny. How much did this cost? The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total. The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that. I actually find it funny how cheap computers are. The cabinetry around the game stations cost a similar amount to the computers powering them. Think about that! The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges. Whereas the computers in total contain more than a trillion transistors, each of which had to be carefully etched in the right spot connected correctly to all the others. A trillion! That's 1,000,000,000,000! Of course, the point is, GPUs are mass-produced. Cabinets for game stations in LAN-party-optimized houses are, um, not. Where did you get the money? This question also makes me uncomfortable, but I know from last time that people will ask it, and if I don't answer, people will make things up. So, OK, I will tell you. I (Kenton) started my career at Google in 2005, which was a pretty good time to be there, even as a junior engineer. They gave me stock, and that stock went up. With no family and no hobbies aside from video games, money piled up in my bank account. After 4-5 years of saving, I was able to make a $200k down payment on a $1M construction loan (later converted into a mortgage). In many places that could have bought a mansion, but in Palo Alto it got me a tiny sliver of land and a 1400 sqft house. Still, I considered myself rich. Then things got weird. The success of Google, Facebook, and others in Silicon Valley had produced a large number of people in the area with a lot of money, ready to buy houses and start families. Meanwhile, NIMBY policies were blocking all new development. As a result, Palo Alto housing prices, already high, went bonkers over the course of the 2010's. My house, which had cost me $1M, became worth over $2M. This is absolutely unfair! I built the house so that I could throw parties and play video games with my friends. These do not seem like activities that are supposed to make money. But it made me a million dollars in profit. What? So basically, we were able to parlay that into a bigger house in Austin. And just in time! While Austin housing prices had been growing for a while, they really exploded after 2020. We bought our property in late 2019. (Aside: Today, in 2024, Austin housing prices are now actually declining rapidly, due to an enormous amount of new housing having been built over the last few years. Yes, it can be done! Now is a great time to move to Austin!) For completeness, I'll mention two other not-insignificant sources of money. First, Jade and I joined Cloudflare in 2017, a couple years before its IPO. This was a good time to join. The stock has done very well, even hitting a high point just as we started construction. Second, Jade has long been an active (albeit small-scale) seed-stage investor in startups. Before she met me, she invested in Matterport, in their very first funding round. They went on to become a public company. We were already in the process of moving to Austin before either Cloudflare or Matterport went public, so we didn't have any idea at the time how much they'd pay off. But they did, and this allowed us to expand scope. Yes, we are very lucky! About LAN Parties What's a LAN party? It's where everyone goes to one place and plays multiplayer videogames with each player having their own computer, connected over a Local Area Network. In the 90's, when internet connections