Christmas comes but once a year and with comes another festive expansion to ever popular Winter Village range. As it hits 10 years since the first set was released, things have got a little sweeter with the release of the LEGO® Creator Expert Gingerbread House. This tasty new set is a brick-built recreation of the traditional biscuit built houses often created around Christmas. In fact no other sweet treat symbolises the festive period more than gingerbread. The edible version originates from Germany but has become a global tradition thanks to English settlers taking the concept to the countries. This LEGO version may not be as morish as the biscuit it’s based on, but it’s certainly a treat for the eyes. But is it a worthy addition to the LEGO Winter Village range? Grab a glass of milk and get ready to dip into my review of set 10267: Gingerbread House.
Product Description
Enjoy a festive build and play experience with the LEGO® Creator Expert 10267 Gingerbread House. A treasure chest of magical details, this amazing model features frosted roofs with colourful candy buttons and a delicious facade with candy-cane columns, glittery windows and a tall chimney stack with a glowing fireplace. Inside the house there’s an array of fun details and candy furnishings including a tasteful bedroom with chocolate bed and cotton candy lamp, and a bathroom with the essential toilet and bathtub. This wonderful LEGO Gingerbread House sets the scene for imaginative adventures with the gingerbread family. Children can light up the cozy fireplace, help clear the sidewalk with the snow blower and nestle the gingerbread baby in its carriage. It also includes a decorated Christmas tree with wrapped gifts and toys, including a rocking horse and a toy train. This advanced LEGO set delivers a challenging and rewarding building experience and makes a great seasonal centerpiece for the home or office. Includes gingerbread man, woman and baby figures.
- Set Name: Gingerbread House
- Set Number: 10267
- Pieces: 1477
- RRP: £84.99/$89.99/€89.99
- Measurements: measures over 21cm high, 26cm wide and 13cm deep
- Minifigures:A gingerbread man, gingerbread woman and gingerbread baby
- Availability: LEGO Brand Store, LEGO.com & LEGO retailers
The Build
The build begins with a selection of minibuilds, built separately from the Gingerbread House. These include a Christmas tree, snowblower, pram and selection of festive treats. Christmas trees are a popular feature of the Winter Village sets, and with each new release we get to see a different style tree. This years tree is similar to some of the more recent ones, with a few side studded 1×1 bricks and four panels added to them. It’s topped with a nice looking star made from the transparent diamond elements from the LEGO Elves sets.
A Christmas tree needs to be surrounded with some festive gifts, so there are a number of different presents to set around it. These include a rocking horse, train, truck and some wrapped gift. They are joined a couple of larger builds, one is a cool little snow blower, this uses parts well to create a fun little device. Lastly is a nice pram for the gingerbread baby, this has enough room to lay the gingerbread baby tile down. Both the pram and snow blower, have been jazzed up with various sweetie elements.
So onto the house itself, like many of the other Winter Village sets, this is an opened back building. But unlike the past WV sets this one is pure fantasy. The house is built upon a 16×16 base plate, with a number of other white plates around it. So it’s footprint is nice and compact, perfect should you wish to display at Christmas. The outside of the building has an amazing amount of colourful details. Mainly thanks to the icing lined roof panels, dotted with colourful 1×1 flat studs. These use reddish brown plates to look like freshly baked gingerbread biscuit panels. They are lined with a mix of white flat tiles, with the curved flat plates looking great against the straight ones. Each roof panels also has various coloured 1x flat round tiles, to represent colourful sweets and each panels has 2×3 rock plates in white on its edge, which looks like hanging drifts of snow.
One of my favourite pieces of detail can be found next to the chimney stack. There are two Technic tubes, topped with a printed log end. These are snuggly connect to give the impression of a stack of logs, ready to be used for firewood. That chimney acts as the central point of the house. Within the chimney is a fireplace, nothing odd there, however it opens out not only into the house but also outside. Maybe the Gingerbread folk don’t feel the cool as much. Despite the questionable architectural choice, I quite like the that the fireplace opens out into both sides of the house. The chimney may not look much but it features a device that allows you to press down the smoke element at the top of the stack, which illuminates the hidden light brick and makes the fire glow.
The Gingerbread House introduces a new for 2019 element in the form of transparent 1×1 transparent glitter specked purple bricks. These are combined with pink versions to create amazingly effective windows. These are stacked sideways and edged with green plates to give a unique looking set of windows. Not only do they look great against the darker colours of the rest of the house, when they catch the light the look even better. I can’t wait to see them once the Christmas light are up. The windows are obviously meant to look like boiled sweets used on real gingerbread houses, and the sweet treats are well represented throughout the set, with chocolate bar elements, cookies, candy canes and more used to create little details on the walls of the house and even the furniture.
Which takes us nicely inside the house. This open plan dwelling comes complete with a kitchen and living room. On the upper floor is a small bedroom and bathroom. Although these areas are not that roomy, they still have plenty of detail. As mentioned above the the use of elements to represent sweets are heavily used and to great effect. The bed looks like a wafer biscuit, the lampshade is a candy floss swirl and the handles to drawers are biscuits. I love each and every one of them. The bathroom area is also rather fun with an excellent little loo, perfect for dropping off a chocolate log or two (sorry) and on the lower floor is an ace kitchen area. Simply done but looks great, especially the cooker hood. Many of the details are achieved with elements, but there are a couple of stickers, one on the doormat, the Candy Lane sign hanging on the Candy Canes and one above the fireplace.
The Minifigures
The Gingerbread Man Minifigure first appeared in series 11 of the Collectable LEGO Minifigures, it also appeared in a special seasonal Minifigure box a few years later. The set features two Minifigures Mr Gingerbread and Mrs Gingerbread, these use the same flat disc head as those other Gingerbread Men. There is a slight variant here, with Mrs Gingerbread having a pink coloured filling in the middle of her biscuit head. She also has a one of the newish solid skirt elements, coloured to match the rest of her body. Both the Minifigures have almost the exact same print details as the original Gingerbread Man, with a few slight additions including red buttons instead of white. Mrs Gingerbread has rosy cheeks and lipstick, with Mr Gingerbread sporting a fetching mustache.
They are joined by their baby, who is a 1×2 printed tile. Now I must admit I was disappointed it was a tile instead of a baby figure. But if this used the tiny Minifigure head it would look out of place next to the standard Minifigures with gingerbread heads and the creation of a micro gingerbread head who have little use elsewhere. So a tile is the best option, plus it nicely fits with a concept of a biscuit.
Overall
Although I haven’t built every one of the Winter Village sets, I’ve built most of them and I have to say this is my favourite. It’s a great build, with some great techniques used to create the structure and much of its details. It’s also an extremely colourful, although sets have been a little festive, they haven’t been overly colourful, which is another reason why I like the set. It’s the perfect celebration of the festive period. The only issue I have with the set is the base section. The central sections is a single 16×16 plate, which other plates connected around it via the structure of the building. However each side of the 16×16 plate, there is nothing above it to bridge the connection so it feels a little unstable. But the Winter Village sets aren’t really created to be overly played with or moved around and it’s not so bad that the whole set would come apart. Apart from that this is a worthy addition to the Winter Village line-up
This set was provided to BricksFanz by the LEGO Group for purposes of review. The thoughts within this review are that of BricksFanz and do not reflect those of the LEGO Group. Providing the set for free, does not guarantee a favourable opinion of the set.
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