Kenton Varda, tech lead of Cloudflare Workers, creator of Cap’n Proto and co-lead of the original open source release of Protocol Buffers, has published a detailed walkthrough of his LAN party-optimized home in Austin, Texas, completed in late 2023. The basement game room features 12 PCs concealed behind wood-paneled fold-out cabinetry — closed, the stations look like plain wall paneling; open, each swings out into a full desk with a monitor on a retractable arm and a power outlet for charging. Four removable carpet-covered floor panels hide built-in Dance Dance Revolution pads beneath. The upstairs office conference table is a second trick: its surface unfolds to reveal six more game stations with monitors mounted underneath. All 20 game machines (Intel i5-13600KF, RTX 4070, 32GB DDR5) are rack-mounted in 4U chassis in a dedicated engine room, connected to the gaming rooms via up to 100-foot fiber-optic DisplayPort and USB cables, with a dedicated A/C unit cooling the racks and 2 Gbps Google Fiber feeding the house.
Rather than maintaining 20 separate OS installs, Varda runs a single shared disk image on a server from which all machines netboot; each station gets a copy-on-write overlay so guest sessions are isolated and wiped after the party. The full networking stack — 35 wall boxes with 4 ports each, 7 PoE WAPs, 8 security cameras — runs entirely on UniFi. Varda notes with some wryness that the custom cabinetry cost roughly the same as the computers it houses: “a few screws and hinges” versus “more than a trillion transistors.” He and his wife Jade Wang — neuroscience PhD, former NASA researcher, and ex-Head of Startups at Cloudflare — bought the Austin lot in 2019 and designed many features themselves, with lead architect Richard Varda (Kenton’s father, who has designed everything from houses to The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh). This is actually Kenton’s second LAN party house; his 2011 Palo Alto build also went viral, though at just 1,400 sq ft it was the bachelor pad version. Scripts for the netboot setup are open-sourced on GitHub.