Building Lego® Friends Heartlake City

The Wellington Brickshow 2024 was coming up in September, but way back in February, Well-LUG member Phil Bradshaw floated the idea around the club of doing a collaborative (collab) display based on the ‘Lego Friends’ theme.

This piqued my interest. I’ve always been fond of the Friends theme sets for the colours and parts, but even more so lately as the sets coming out had stepped up in terms of complexity of build technique and interesting and often progressive ideas. I had also seen an awesome display at Legoland Windsor (UK) in 2017 of the Friends’ home ‘Heartlake City’, which really impressed me. I wanted to create something like that. By teaming up with Phil and other builders, and with the generous lead time, perhaps we could!

Phil convened some meetings to brainstorm what we would do. We were discussing the configuration, and it dawned on me that the display case I’d used for previous projects could be given a new lease on life for this. It had been gathering dust in my shed for years just for this! The only trouble was it is really big – 6.0m long and 1.8m deep. We’d have to build a lot of models to fill the space.

Everyone was on board with the idea of boosting the size of sets by ‘doubling’ them and filling in gaps that the sets typically had in the back to build an impressive Heartlake City, with a literal heart-shaped lake in the middle. This would be Friends on steroids! Some sets were great as-is of course. Using all these ideas I created the first version of the layout plan and Phil and I set about recruiting builders, recording what sets they could offer.

Over the course of the intervening months more and more people came on board. People with extra Friends sets lent them to others to assist with the ‘doubling’ concept. Cathy Griffin was an anchor of the project with her vast collection. We knew if we couldn’t get quite enough stuff prepared in advance, Cathy could bring extra sets along and we’d build them in the last few days before the show to fill gaps.

In August we had a working bee to repair, modify and repair the old display case. Lead artist was my daughter Holly, assisted by my son Jonathan and Demetrio our homestay student from Italy. Phil handled logistics and woodwork. I concentrated on painting the base layout. Two days work and it was done. We had Steph Smith of Big Mac Slabs for lending us her creative space to use for the weekend.

Through the months we had regular meetings and stayed in touch on Facebook, on email and at out monthly club meetings. I took the lead co-ordinating who was doing what and providing advice on integration, and the layout plan evolved.

The week of the Wellington Brickshow arrived and so did Cathy from the South Island with a bunch of extra sets for us to build – Rebekah Roos and Lisa Kinghorn assisted with this. Assembly day came on Thursday and the case took shape at the venue, the Walter Nash Centre. Andrew Hood and Sophie Bradshaw-Ross stepped up to help with this. Then it was time for the Lego to go in. Lachlan Moar went first setting up the custom train he built.

As the builders arrived with their creations, we took pics of them and their creations. Rosy Moar, Lachlan’s mum was a great help with this. On the Friday (the ‘fan’ day, with no public present) we ran an activity to build trees for the layout, put on the final touches, made a ‘credit’ photo board and added signage. At 5:30pm, I ventured into the display as ‘Jakezilla’ to place the last models to arrive, from Wendy and Solenne.

Then finally the public arrived and it was all systems go! Check it out here:

We were thrilled with how it turned out – the backdrop really set the scene, the plus-sized models looked great, as did the trees and all the movement, and everything was integrated in a logical way with enough space to appreciate all the different elements. We’d really taken the Heartlake City to the next level with some next-level co-operation and collaboration.

And that’s it! We had to pack it all up on Sunday. However we are seriously considering taking it to other Lego shows in the Lower North Island next year.

Builders and their Friends Builds