Why This Matters
A software engineer (Cloudflare's Kenton Varda) and entrepreneur Jade Wang built a custom Austin house purpose-designed around LAN parties, complete with built-in gaming stations and planned conduit routing, working with an architect family member. It's a niche but resonant example of how deeply gaming culture shapes personal spaces, and a follow-up to Varda's viral 2011 LAN house in Palo Alto.
Key Takeaways
- Kenton Varda and Jade Wang designed and built an Austin home from an empty lot specifically optimized for LAN parties, completed in late 2023 after starting in 2019.
- Kenton's father, architect Richard Varda, led the design, with Kenton personally designing the game stations, conference table, and technical infrastructure like conduit routing.
- This is Varda's second LAN-optimized house; his 2011 Palo Alto version went viral, and the new site is self-built and unsponsored.
This is the hardware before it went into the machines.
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:
Jade is an entrepreneur. She:
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.
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