Cloudflare Workers creator built a custom Austin home wired for LAN parties

Kenton Varda, tech lead of Cloudflare’s Workers platform and the engineer behind Cap’n Proto and Google’s open-sourced Protocol Buffers, and his wife Jade Wang, a neuroscience PhD and former Head of Startups at Cloudflare, designed and built a house in Austin engineered around multiplayer gaming. The basement holds 20-plus identical game machines—many folding into the walls, others hidden under a transforming table, plus DDR pads in the floor—all netbooting from a single shared disk image on a central server. Each rig runs an Intel Core i5-13600, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX 4070. The networking is industrial-grade: 35 quad-port wall boxes, seven PoE access points, eight cameras, three intercoms, all UniFi, fed by 2 Gbps fiber.

The house doubles as a family home, with cat-climbing shelves, cat doors into lofted kids’ bedrooms, guest rooms, and soundproofed ‘call rooms’ that also serve as game stations. Kenton’s father, architect Richard Varda—whose portfolio includes Riyadh’s Kingdom Centre and Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum—led the design, with Kenton personally engineering the cabinetry, conduit routing, and most technical systems. The lot was bought in 2019, construction began in 2021, and the home was finished in late 2023.

The project is a sequel: Varda built a smaller 1,400-sqft LAN-optimized house in Palo Alto in 2011 that went viral. He notes the ~$75,000 spent on 22 gaming machines was roughly matched by the cost of the wooden cabinetry housing them—a wry observation that mass-produced silicon holding a trillion transistors is now cheaper than custom carpentry. The move to Texas was originally driven by Cloudflare’s growing Austin office and a surprisingly higher-ranked school district, though the reasoning evaporated when COVID pushed the company fully remote right after they relocated.