It's that time of year again and Christmas lights are being pulled out of closets, but we're pulling out a different kind of light over here at the Light My Bricks design studio. We’re talking about bit lights of course!
For LEGO's latest instalment of the annual Winter Village Series, the all new Elf Clubhouse 10275.
Each year LEGO fans eagerly anticipate the seasonal release of the next build to add to their Christmas displays. Beginning with the 10245 Santa's Workshop, the Winter Village is one of the most popular themes in the LEGO range.
The series has so far, featured two different kinds of sets, one a more realistic Winter town including buildings like the Fire Station, Bakery and Post Office. A Winter LEGO CITY if you will. The second is a more fantastical type of set featuring none other than Father Christmas and all of the characters that follow him.
This Winter Village appears to be modelled directly after the North Pole and the Elf Clubhouse sits front and centre in this world!
A modest sized set, with a piece count of just over 1000 bricks, it's perfectly sized as a Christmas gift for anyone in the family.
Christmas certainly came early for us this year and when the mail carrier delivered this one to us, we couldn't wait to get into the Christmas spirit. The first two things we noticed were the brand new tree (always a favourite for our lighting designers) and this new reindeer figure.
No red nose for us to light (Rudolf must be out on a mission with the boss!) but an awesome figure all the same!
Alright, time to build!
We began organising the familiar bags of bricks into something resembling an order and began flipping through the instructional guide. Interesting to note that lately certain guides have a black background, up until now this hasn’t been a problem at all - a sleek look in fact!
Though with the dark brown bricks featured here, we did notice the directions a little difficult to read, as they're still outlined in black. No real major difficulty though, just an interesting note with a little extra concentration required.
Overall a fun, interesting build suited to a range of ages we think. A construction time of roughly three hours.
Younger LEGO fans will have no trouble with this build, while older more experienced brickitects will find plenty here to keep them engaged. The roof's A frame construction is particularly interesting and we really enjoy the additional hinge elements that have been included through the design (can’t stop adjusting the telescope and balcony!).
Anyone in the mood for waffles? We've built a few Christmas trees in our time and we like the simplicity of this one here, as well as the over sized star of Bethlehem.
That will certainly be fun to light up.
Speaking of lighting up, that's exactly what we did next!
The overall feel we wanted to create for this set was a warm and cozy vibe, expanding on the ambiance created by the LEGO light brick installed above the elves' bunk bed.
This meant keeping things quite minimal inside the cabin’s interior for our designers, opting for a single lamp light on the top floor and a lone bit light in the kitchen downstairs. It doesn’t get much more minimal than that!
Next we moved outside to the exterior. Without a doubt, the hero of this kit is the chain of lights draped over that impressive A frame roof. For this we used the trusty flashing micro bit lights.
As stated in previous blogs, these guys seriously fit anywhere and due to the construction of the roof panels, the large number of wires which normally would be a real challenge to deal with, were actually easily concealed. The result is very satisfying indeed.
Personally, we really enjoyed the humour injected into this years set. I don’t know why exactly, but something about that waffle maker cracks us up! The fact that the elves keep track of who’s been naughty and nice on a desktop computer is just as hilarious.
Overall another great addition to the Winter Village range, the clubhouse will fit nicely into those enormous collections that get brought out once a year (we’ve seen your photos!) but is also a lot of fun to build, light and display on its own.
Let us know what you think! Will you be adding this to your Christmas wishlist?
Or perhaps you’ll be wrapping one up and placing it in someone else’s stocking. Either way make sure you’re nice and not naughty, I hear those elves have your file on their hard drive.