Sunday, October 19, 2008

Beach House - part three

Here's a photo review of LEGO set 4996: Beach House from the Creator line. This is the third and last official mode of the set.

It's a nice, two story american-style house. In terms of overall appearance, it's the least imposing of the three builds, but I find it very charming.

The rear roof opens up to show the interior. You can see that the second floor is pretty small... I can't say that it's minifig scale anymore.

Unlike the first mode, you can't take off the top floor. If you peer in through the roof, you can see some sort of oven and a coffee machine! Nice accessorizing, too bad you can't see it so easily. I like this mode the best despite it's flaws.

Overall, this set is pretty good. No minifigs, but you can easily get those elsewhere. Like the other sets of the Creator line, it's best for those who'd want to build and rebuild their Lego.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for your review! :)

I just bought this set today. It must be about ten years since I bought a new LEGO set. It's nice to see that LEGO have returned to 'proper' pieces, though the brick-built tree might be taking things a bit far.

Actually I guess it's obvious that Creator is all about building things from bricks - like Model Team used to be. It's not really in the 'Town' genre, even thouugh 4996 is a house. I want to add it to my town layout from the 80s - currently undergoing restoration and lots of classic set purchases.

Look at set 6370 for example which costs about twice as much as the Creator house. [URL]http://www.brickset.com/detail.aspx?Set=6370-1[/URL] 6370 is one of my favourite houses. When you put the Creator house next to it, both look slightly ridiculous. The old 6370 suddenly looks small and simple, the new 4996 seems over-large. For instance, is the outdoor table really at minifig height? And, I wonder why the doors and windows are so high?

I built the cafe first off and was surprised by having over a hundred pieces left over. Next I'm going to try and build something more along the lines of the 80s houses - it will be two-level for certain, but the bottom level will be no taller than one window. There's lots of items for interior details and plenty of bricks for walls and corners. Should be fun!

Cheers,
-Alex