I have spent years perfecting my gaming house. So imagine then my disappointment
when I found out that Kenton Barta not only beat me to it, but built it better
than I could have dreamed. And here I am
in Austin, Texas, where everything is bigger to take you guys on an exclusive
tour of landparty. The ultimate gamer house for
you and 22 of your closest friends. Everything about it is mindblowing. From
the hideaway gaming rigs to the dedicated cat bathrooms to the floor
panels that lift up to reveal an arcade's worth of DDR dance platforms.
And Kenton and his wife Jade spent their entire Saturday taking us around so we
could dive deep and give you guys some inspiration for your next gaming space
along with some helpful what not to do and some helpful segways to our sponsor.
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In fairness to me, Kenton did have a bit of a leg up when it came to designing
the ultimate gamer house. I mean, for starters, his dad is low-key kind of a
big deal in architectural design. And for another thing, this is actually V2,
borrowing many ideas from his original Land Party House, but iterating on them,
both in terms of refinement and in terms of scale. For starters, he used to have
monitors at each station mounted to rails that would lift up to display
artwork whenever they weren't in use. Only he realized that he never once used
them for that. So, he devised a new
system where they hide away completely.
The grown-up playroom consists of a total of 12 completely invisible and
inaudible gaming setups. All you have to do to deploy one is open the bottom
cabinetry and fold down the tabletop. And that's it. For extra gamer cred,
these 32-inch Corsair Xenon 4K 144Hz
monitors are mounted with lowprofile articulating mounts so you can pull them
forward and oh yeah, get in the zone or
well, as long as you have peripherals, which he thought of. Every station
includes a keyboard and a mouse and okay, this is a bit of an odd choice, a
soundbar. I asked about this and Kenton
explains that they mostly play co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic and they
find that the advantage of being able to yell across the room at each other
outweighs the disadvantage of soundleed. And of course, anyone who wants can plug
a headset into the provided USB hub or
integrated 3 and 12 mm jack. Speaking of plugging in, this is a nice touch. The
original house had the power outlets directly behind the monitor, which is
symmetrical, but makes plugging things in a bit of a pain in the butt if you
bring your phone or some random other peripherals. I think the only thing that
I would change here then is to uh maybe add a desk pad.
ltstore.com. Above each station is a cupboard for snackies, which um Kenton,
you might want to restock cuz I understand you've got company coming in
a couple of hours. They actually arranged to have a land tonight. so that
we could see everything deployed and maybe even get a couple games in before
we have to drive up to Houston. Of course, desktop PC gaming is just one
kind of gaming. What about the 98 in Samsung elephant in the room? Oh, for
the more PlayStation inclined, there's a PS5 hooked up to a Morance AV receiver
and a 5.1 electrostatic speaker setup.
And I got to say, I absolutely love the
thoughtful design of the built-in console up here. Unlike my setup, the
front outlets are actually reachable, making charging your lap board or your
controllers a piece of cake. Speaking of controllers, storage for them is built
into the four Lazy Boy powered recliners at the back of the room. By the way,
love to see that old school Xbox 360 wireless dongle. Look, if it works, it
works. I do have a couple of notes. even
angled toward the seating position. Ceiling mounted is not really ideal for
rear speakers and some acoustic materials on this cabinetry would go a
long way towards improving the surround sound experience in this room. With that
said, it sounds like most of the content that Kenton listens to in here is
stereomixed music anyway. And that is
where these come in. Oh, it's heavy. Embedded into the concrete slab
of this house are four, yes, four, DDR
dance platforms from Eltech. Kenton, like me, is a big games for exercise guy
and says he tries to use these about every other day to keep up his cardio
fitness. Now, at this time, he hasn't actually gotten all four working at once
yet, but it was a lot easier to put in the conduit for all four now and then
hope the software would get easier to use later, rather than adding more
conduit after the fact. And besides, how boring would life be without a few dozen
items remaining on your never- ending house project? Oh, speaking of conduit,
remember how I said that the gaming systems were inaudible? That's because I
am officially not alone. Beside the adult playroom, excuse me, the grown-up
playroom is what Kenton's HVAC contractor called by far the biggest
server rack I've ever seen in a residential building. And while yes, it
does in fact have a small AMD Epic actual server in the server rack for AI
tinkering and a persistent Minecraft instance for the kids, the vast majority
of these rigs are identical gaming systems that power every station in the
house. Now, since rack mount gaming
hasn't taken off yet, yet solidarity,
Kenton ended up hosting a good old-fashioned PC build party with some
of his old land buddies, and they put all 20 of these together over a couple
of days. They're fairly modestly speced
considering the overall LAN house budget was somewhere in the seven figure range,
but I think Kenton mostly achieved his stated goal of hitting the price for
performance sweet spot while keeping the systems easily manageable. On that note,
none of these use local storage. Instead, all of them boot from a single
network image on that server that allows games to be installed on all of them
simultaneously. that allows them all to be kept up to date easily and allows
them to be quickly factory reset in the
event that a guest bungs something up. By the way, he's got a GitHub repo with
all of the quirky workarounds that he had to use to make this setup work. That
um would have come in handy for us recently. Why?
His only major regret is the motherboards whose onboard 10 gig
network cards struggle sometimes when booting over ice scuzzy leading to the
occasional crash. Guests are going to be here in less than half an hour, by the way. So, I guess we get to go through
the boot sequence. You want to show us how to fire it all up? Sure. What? But
it's that easy. You just press the button. Okay, that's pretty cool. Wake
on land kind of magic. I assume it's wake on land. Yep. Now, there are some
disadvantages to not having hardline power buttons to all the stations. and
he had an idea for like a networkattached USB hub of some sort
with like relays or something so that he could power cycle them in the event of a
crash, but hasn't gotten to it yet. Overall, I love this design. I mean,
sure, he can't dump his waste heat into his pool, but by going with taller 4U
cases, he also doesn't need to resort to water cooling to deal with all of this
heat. He just lets the cool air fall down in front of the racks and then
blasts all the hot air out into his hot
aisle in the back where it can be picked up by the air handler and rinse and
repeat. Apparently, by the way, at full boom, this rack can suck back about
15,000 W. Thankfully, most games don't
push it that hard. And Kenton has a large solar array that in February
generates around 75 kwatt hours a day. So, I guess that takes some of the sting
out of it, but for those wondering, yes,
a lot of power and also a lot of networking. Let's talk about that. A
full ubiquity setup might seem a little overkill for home, but hey, if you got
the budget for it, boy, is it ever nice. The AI object detection in their PoE
cameras helps Kenton sleep soundly, alerting him if anyone approaches the
house unexpectedly. And all of these systems are wired up for 10 gig
networking with PoE all over the house for cameras and Wi-Fi.
Kenton acknowledges that most setups at
this scale would probably use a patch panel and uh would probably benefit from
better cable management, but as a software developer, he says he just plum
wasn't familiar with them and the RJ45 terminations directly into the network
equipment hasn't really bothered him. Uh I am going to pipe up with uh one other
note by the way. A 208vt network
monitored PDU probably would have been a good choice rather than a um pillar with
power plugs in it. Um maybe a battery
backup, but if I'm being realistic, for periodic gaming parties, this is
probably fine. Like me, Kenton is using fiber optic DisplayPort cables to go
from his systems to his monitors all over the house, and he's been really
happy with his Monoprice slim cables. The longer runs to the upstairs are
apparently working great and are like 100 ft. But unlike me, Kenton is using
fiber optic USB cables to powered hubs for his peripherals. And he says
sometimes these can be a little flaky, but they are much more affordable than
Thunderbolt or Icon Dogs. Coming back out of the server room, we didn't really
show the tinker space yet. And there's a bunch of cool stuff in here. Old
Nintendo Power magazines, a broken Dell8K monitor, and I love this touch.
All of Kenton's systems, other than his personal Debian Linux development
workstation, are named for Mega Man bosses and have static network
assignments that correspond to the boss's numbers. So, if you need to
remember an IP address, it's as simple as consulting the Mega Man wiki. It's
flawless. The last room in the basement is not for people. Well, not for
regularsized people, anyway. Nope. The Landhouse has not one but two dedicated
kitty bathrooms with pet doors and 24/7
negative air pressure outdoor venting in order to keep litter and litter smells
out of the rest of the house. Uh, this also happens to be where Kenton keeps
his trophy that he won for arguing on the internet. Good job. Moving up to the
main floor. What about second giant TV?
This one's not quite as big, but given that it mostly gets used for Animal
Crossing and duck game with large groups, I guess that's probably okay, at
least for now since he had the opportunity to design and build the
place from scratch. Kent put conduit everywhere. That means that in the long
term, nothing would prevent him from running cables down through the back of
this and running this off of a PC in the server room. By the way, since we're in
here, I love this. If you look closely from now on, you're going to notice that
everywhere that a normal house or even a gaming house would have had one network
port. Kenton put four. That's because
the price difference that the contractor quoted was only about 20%. So, Kenton
was like, "Okay, I guess I'll just put an access point anywhere I want." He
apparently has like eight or 10. He lost count. Surprisingly, the main bedroom is
apparently pretty plain jane, other than, of course, having conduit back to
the server room, just in case. But the kids bedrooms are amazing. First,
there's this kitty shelf in the family room that actually goes between them for
late night visits from the cat while still allowing them to close the doors
for privacy. Then, there's this incredible loft bed setup. And of
course, there's conduit back to the server room for when the kids are old
enough to need powerful workstations. Um, should I be the one to tell them
that they all just use Chromebooks? Now, I'm not going to tell them. This drying
rack is awesome. It's not gaming, but I thought it was cool. So, um, let's head
upstairs to the office. It's a little
ironic that Kenton only moved here to be closer to Cloudflare's Austin office and
now primarily works from home ever since co. But hey, at least he got this house
out of it. And it's amazing with this room being one of the best. The his and
hers workstations here both use Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 monitors, which
essentially are two 4K monitors built
into one and wrapped around you. And both have kinesis keyboards for better
ergonomics. Like any D'vorak user, Kenton pointed out that he uses D'vorak.
But no, he does not actually recommend it because he has had to personally code
utilities for multiple platforms now that automatically switch to a certy
layout when he holds the control key so that he can reach copy paste for crying
out loud. What he does recommend though is the ability to seamlessly move his
mouse between his work tower and his personal machine using an application
called Barrier. And because this monitor is super cool, it allows you to assign
more or less of it to each machine
depending on the focus of the day. That is actually a pretty strong argument for
this thing versus two equally sized 4K screens. Great flexibility. There's also
another TV in here, although mostly gets used for music via Google Chcast. And
there's a boardroom table that Wait, no
way. also converts into land gaming
paradise. You have got to be kidding me.
In total, that puts this room at another eight gaming setups, all of which are
wired down to the server room through a cable run that goes right down the
middle of the table like a regular conference table. That means no heat and
no fan noise that's kicking out into the room from any of these, even with a full
house. This space also gets used for tabletop gaming though, so keeping it
thin was a priority. And keep it thin, they did. Fun fact, by the way, Kenton
designed this table himself in SketchUp and then had the cabinet maker bring it
to life for him. Man, I got to do more stuff like that. Then maybe I too would
have a secret drink fridge in my home office. So cool. Literally. As for the
rest of the upstairs, it continues to be gamer AF with a couple of call rooms
with uh essential features like quad Ethernet ports and conduit down to the
server room. The one has a treadmill so that you can be that guy on the
conference call whose head is bobbing around. And there's also a couple of
guest bedrooms cuz occasionally folks will fly in from out of town for
gettogethers and gaming parties and it's nice to be able to accommodate them on
site. Both of them naturally also have
3-in conduit back to the server room and networking up the wazoo. But the thing
is, when you're running optical DisplayPort or whatever, it's kind of necessary
to have a big conduit if you want to get the connector through. Now, I noticed
that Kenton like me irrationally put Cat
6A absolutely everywhere, which is always a funny conversation with
contractors who go, I mean, yeah, I'll take your money, but like I hate working
with this stuff. Are you sure you don't want to use Cat 5e? Please IP address is
the last major tech feature is an intercom system to the outdoor spaces,
but um they work about as well as my light
switches at home for the time being. They're SIP phones and Kenton hasn't
learned about SIP infrastructure yet. So, all they do for now is broadcast
their IP address endlessly until you press the button again, which apparently
the kids love to do just to troll him. So, in the middle of the night, he'll be
like, "Is someone in our house?"
Six. Shut up. All that remains then is to ask, "How'd I do? I'm thinking of
starting one of those like realtor YouTube channels where I tour the houses
that I'm listing for sale." Um, so this is kind of a trial run for me. Were you
guys thinking of selling by any chance? No.
I didn't tell them I was going to do that.
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using our link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe
check out the time we did a land party in my entire house. It wasn't as slick,
but I had way more people, so They're doing it.