I'm in the same boat. I set up wireguard network on my unraid server at my main house. Then set up a network to network bridge to another unraid server at my other house. My devices (really just my phone) can use either a phone to LAN connection or a complete tunneled connection to my server, from anywhere. My devices at either of my houses behave as if they're on the same network.

It wasn't very intuitive to set up but it took less than an hour and it has worked flawlessly for years. Unraid definitely made it a bit easier. Seems Tailscale almost completely solves that complexity for the initial setup and each additional device.