Most people build a home theater. This engineer built a 20-node LAN party house.

Most homeowners debate kitchen tile. Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda built a custom house designed specifically for 20-person LAN parties.

Varda and his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang, custom-designed their Austin home from the ground up for high-bandwidth PC gaming. The centerpiece is a server room cooling 20 identical machines that netboot off a shared disk image. Cables pass through wall conduits to 12 fold-out basement stations, a six-player transforming office table, and dedicated call rooms.

Why it matters: In-person PC gaming usually means loose cables and blown circuit breakers. Varda's junior high friend group has hosted LAN parties for nearly 30 years, so they built a permanent fix: 2 Gbps fiber infrastructure, custom server cooling, and floor-embedded Dance Dance Revolution pads built directly into the floorplan.

The hardware: Each gaming rig packs an Intel i5-13600, 32GB RAM, and an RTX 4070 GPU. The network runs entirely on UniFi gear, backed by 35 Cat6 wall boxes with four ports each and dedicated A/C intakes for the server rack.

Good luck convincing your landlord to cut cable conduits into the drywall.