A Texas couple has shared expansive details of their home. But why would Tom’s Hardware be interested? Because software engineer Kenton Varda and entrepreneur Jade Wang’s lanparty.house website boasts that they “built our house for LAN parties.” The high-tech Austin home is stuffed with 22 muscular modern gaming PCs, oodles of servers, and bucketfuls of supporting tech. Also, to prevent your body and peepers from seizing up after long LAN party sessions, there is a Dance Dance Revolution room and a 30-mile-view roof deck for the family and guests.
Our younger readers may not be familiar with LAN parties. In the days before widely available and fast internet connectivity, large groups of people enjoyed online competitive gaming over a local area network (LAN). Varda recalls his first LAN party, which involved four 486-era PCs, playing Doom 2 with three others all night long.
This pastime grew, with Varda estimating he has been to over 100 LAN parties, usually at friends' homes and typically involving 8-16 people. Some LAN parties, like commercially arranged events, would involve 100s of attendees – meaning hundreds of folks lugging heavy desktops around the country.
Back in the heydays of LAN parties, popular games might have been the aforementioned Doom franchise, plus versions of Unreal Tournament, Quake, StarCraft, and many more.
Shifting our focus back to the present day, and to the awesome lanparty.house, you really have to flick through the pictures to get an idea of the scale and smart integration of so much computer hardware into a family home. Most of the PCs you see can be hidden or folded into wall cabinets and other furnishings. Twelve gaming PCs fold back into wall cabinets, and a large work desk space can be converted into six game stations, for example.
Some of the machines are normal desktop workstations, but most are terminals that connect to the central air-conditioned server room with the PC hardware in 20 gaming servers crammed into racks. That helps the homeowners keep things well-managed and compact in the home's living spaces.
If you are going a little green with envy over the lanparty.house, the hardware was surprisingly affordable. “The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total,” reveals Varda. Meanwhile, a similar Austin home to keep your high-tech gaming gear – and all the other niceties that Varda and Wang have built-in will cost you “a 7-digit number” preceded by a dollar sign.
The base PC spec is an Intel Core i5-13600KF, Gigabyte Windforce RTX 4070, Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard, Corsair MP700 Gen5 1TB NVMe storage, Corsair Vengeance 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 5600, Corsair SF750 PSU, Corsair Xeneon 32UHD144 (32" 4k 144Hz), and Soulion R30 Wired sound bar. Varda defended his choice of cheap keyboard and mouse combo due to personal WASD gaming preference. Where a machine is kept in the server room it is housed in a Rosewill RSV-L4500U 4U chassis.
This hardware is mostly tasked with cooperative or team-driven games, says Varda. A long-time favorite is Deep Rock Galactic, but other titles enjoyed at the lanparty.house include Overwatch, Left 4 Dead 2, FT2, Ark, or Factorio. Occasionally, an Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming session will be enjoyed, too.
Access to the lanparty.house is by invite only. Both Varda and Wang have extensive social media and other online presence, so if you start being publicly nice to them now, there’s a chance you could get invited in 2025, say.
