Couple spends over $1,000,000 to make their Texas home 'optimized' for LAN parties. The result is stunning

Some people dream about a life on the farm, while others fantasize about running away to join a commune. Others are occupied by the idea of a LAN-style party house. Few people achieve this nostalgic dream. They make do with the distance provided by modern online gaming. Then there are the software engineer Kenton Varida and Jade Wang, an entrepreneur, who have built a home that embodies this dream (via TechSpot).

The pair began construction in 2021-2023 after moving their family from Austin, Texas to be closer to the respective Cloudflare teams. The house is a family affair in many ways. In addition to Kenton and Jade, Richard Varda was the project's architect.

The result is a home "optimized" for LAN parties, complete with 22 high-end gaming rigs and miles of managed cable. There's even a hidden Dance Dance Revolution dancing floor.

What games are they playing at this private LAN? According to the official website of the project, it is primarily cooperative games that ensure a fun get-together for all players. Not every regular attendee will be a hardcore gaming enthusiast.

Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress' Mann vs. Machine, and even Overwatch - "back when it used to be good" - were the games of choice. But Deep Rock Galactic has remained the top-rated game for the past five years. Rock and stone baby!

Let's talk about tech. All 22 gaming PCs boot off the same network drive. This allows each to be maintained with the same disk image. It is easy to keep all the machines updated, and new games can be installed only once on the disk image. Each machine has its own copy-onwrite overlay, so LAN party guests are able to make changes to their own set-up without them being shared with the rest of the group.

The machines are equipped with a Gigabyte Windforce RTX 4700 and two 16 GB Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RAM sticks. It's not the latest and greatest flotilla either, with a decent Intel Core i5-13600KF processor. However, this is done on purpose to "stay just below the inflection points where high-end pricing sets in."

As you might have guessed, the project was extremely expensive. Varda and Wang did not disclose the exact cost of the Austin property, but they did say that it was in the seven-digit range. The hardware for the gaming PCs, including cables, keyboards and monitors, cost an additional $75,000. The hardware is housed in custom cabinetry, some of it with a stylish fold-away design. This "cost a comparable amount to the computers that power them." Although no cost has been disclosed, we can safely assume that it is in the vicinity of a million dollar.

They have clearly thought of every detail, and not only from a LAN perspective. It's a functional home for a family, complete with multiple "cat bathrooms". Yes, really.

Kenton hasn't tried this idea before. A property in Palo-Alto in California served as a first draft in 2011. This earlier house was a collaboration between Richard Varda (the accomplished designer behind the new home) and The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, as well as The Musical Instrument Museum of Phoenix, Arizona. Kenton sold the earlier house, which was still impressive but only 1400 square foot.