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Only five children go to this 12,000-square-foot school in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Here, on any given day, 12-year-old twins Logan and Garrett might solve math problems on their computers while their sisters, Sienna, 5, Reagan, 7, and Ava Rose, 10, have recess on the playground. Other times they all work together to memorize passages of Shakespeare or the names of the bones in the human body.

The kids live at the school as well—because it’s also their family’s home. Their mother, Karin Katherine Taylor, is also their teacher. She and her husband, a 59-year-old chief executive of an industrial-distribution firm, built the home six years ago with the intent of home schooling their children there.

The family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom.

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Home schooling is on the rise: In 2012, nearly 1.8 million children in the U.S. were home-schooled, an increase of more than 60% from 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Education. It is also an increasingly popular choice among wealthier families: In 2003, there were so few students from households with over $100,000 in annual income that the Department of Education didn’t track them; in 2012, 1.6% of such students were home-schooled.

A cottage industry of tutors of teachers has cropped up to serve home-schooling families. Manisha Snoyer, a former teacher in Brooklyn, launched Cottage Class a few months ago. It’s an online marketplace where teachers, tutors and parents can offer classes, either in their own homes or someone else’s.