I have spent years perfecting my gaming house, so imagine then my disappointment when I found
out that Kenton Barda 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 Land Party Dot House, the ultimate gamer house for you and 22 of your closest friends.
Everything about it is mind-blowing 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 segues to our sponsor. 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 low-profile 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 explained 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 sound bleed. And of course, anyone who wants
can plug a headset into the provided USB hub or integrate a three and a half millimeter 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 maybe add a desk pad? lttstore.com. Above each station is a cupboard
for snackies, which Kenton, you might want to restock because I understand you've got company
coming in a couple of hours. They actually arranged to have a LAN 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 inch Samsung elephant in the room?
For the more PlayStation inclined, there's a PS5 hooked up to a Marantz AV receiver and a 5.1
electrostatic speaker setup. And I gotta 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 stereo mixed 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. Besides, how boring would life be without a few dozen items remaining on your
never ending house project? I was speaking of conduit. Remember how I said that the gaming
systems were inaudible? That's because I am officially not alone. Beside the adult player,
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 days. They're fairly modestly specced
considering the overall land house budget was somewhere in the seven figure range, but I think
Kenton mostly achieved his stated goal of hitting the price to 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 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
iSCSI leading to the occasional crash. Guess they're gonna 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 pressed 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
network attached 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 watts. Thankfully, most games don't push it that
hard, and Kenton has a large solar array that in February generates around 75 kilowatt 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 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. I am going to pipe up with one other note, by the way, a 208
volt network monitored PDU probably would have been a good choice rather than a pillar with power plugs
in it, 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 mono-price slim cables.
The longer runs to the upstairs are apparently working great and are like 100 feet, 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 IconDocs.
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 Deli 8K 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 bosses'
numbers, so if you need to remember an IP address, it's as simple as consulting the Mega Man wiki.
It's lawless. The last room in the basement is not for people. Well, not for regular-sized 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. 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, Kenton put Kondo it 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 and he lost count. Surprisingly, the main bedroom is apparently
pretty plain Jane other than of course having Kondo it 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 door
for privacy. Then there's this incredible loft bed set up and of course there's Kondo it back to
the server room for when the kids are old enough to need powerful work stations. 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 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 COVID, 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 Dvorak user,
Kenton pointed out that he uses Dvorak, 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
QWERTY 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 Chromecast, and there's a boardroom table that, wait, no way, also converts into
paradise. You have gotta 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 gotta 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
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, because occasionally folks will fly in from out
of town for get-togethers and gaming parties, and it's nice to be able to accommodate them on site.
Both of them naturally also have three inch 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 to go, I mean, you know, 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? The last major tech feature is an intercom system to the outdoor spaces, but
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? Shut up!
All that remains then is to ask, how do 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. So this is kind of a
trial run for me. Were you guys thinking of selling by any chance? No. I didn't tell him I was going to
do that. I don't blame you. But I would blame you for not listening to the segue to our sponsor.