Each year, LEGO releases one large modular building designed for adult collectors who are building their own LEGO City displays. With a January 1, 2025 release date, this year's set is the Tudor Corner building.
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| Image from LEGO.com |
The Tudor Corner comes with 3,266 pieces and seven minifigures (plus an eighth minifigure serving as a mannequin in the Haberdashery shop). The set is another corner building that houses The Old Guarded Inn, the aforementioned Haberdashery Shop on the first floor, a Clockmaker's Shop on the second floor, and a small apartment on the third floor. As with all of the buildings in the modular line, the back of the building is fully enclosed and each floor lifts off so that you can see what is down below.
The building features several distinctly European design elements including the obvious Tudor-style top floor. The English Pub Inn on the bottom floor also has strong European design choices! I love the outdoor seating area for the Inn as well as the ample flowers decorating the facade. Finally, if the British/European aspects weren't obvious enough, one of the included minifigures is a chimney sweep!
Turning the model to one side, we can see the small Haberdashery shop.
The light blue works well to complement the Inn while simultaneously setting the Haberdashery shop apart from the rest of the building. LEGO did a similar thing when they released the Detective's Office set a few years ago in that they created multiple buildings that couldn't actually be separated (as opposed to the Pet Shop modular set from many years ago which was two buildings built on two different, smaller baseplates).
The backside of the model is a plain, boring wall (which is fine since the model is designed to butt up against other buildings for a LEGO city street display) but the fourth side does feature a few details to check out:
Cats play a fairly large role with this particular set - two different cats are included plus the top-floor apartment building is home to a cat-lover (there's even a cat tree which we'll see in a bit). The dumpster behind the stairs holds a fish (perhaps that is what the cat is after) while the rest of the side of the building is mostly plants and a large staircase to the Clockmaker's workshop. The side view gives you a good look at the large clock at the front of the building!
Looking at the first floor, we see a lot of stuff crowded into a very small area!
The Haberdashery shop has lots of hats and yarn for sale while the Inn has a large (breakfast?) bar and a bitty kitchen in the back. Luckily, the LEGO designers realized how tiny the kitchen was so they made the wall that separates the kitchen and Haberdashery shop removable for large human hands to get in there. With the top floors off, you can also see the work that went into getting the angled front of the Guarded Inn looking just right!
Moving up to the second floor, we have so many clocks!
The wide variety of clocks was definitely fun to build, it was neat to see how many different types of clocks the designers could fit into the set. Even more impressive, most of the clocks used very few pieces.
Finally, the top floor features an apartment for a cat-lover.
The cat tree, food dish, and a box for the cat to play in both help tell the story of the apartment's occupant. The apartment also features a neat bug collection and a two-stud deep bookshelf that was fun to build. No bed, kitchen, or bathroom for anyone living in the apartment but I guess that rug is cozy enough to sleep on? There is a bathroom hidden under the stairs on the first floor so maybe that's a shared bathroom for the entire building.
Each of the three floors is quite well decorated inside but I think most people will be drawn to the model because of the outside architecture and details.
The dark red roof design is a particular highlight and it was quite interesting to build. I love how the designer of the model (François Zapf) was able to create such neat and tidy angles as well as the white and black spaces for the Tudor-style design on the third floor.
The Bottom Line (out of 10):
Build Experience: 10
Play Value: 8
Kid Value: 7
Adult Value: 10
Overall: 10
The LEGO Modular line isn't necessarily designed with kids and play in mind, however, LEGO did include some throwbacks to previous modular buildings which was fun to read about in the instruction manual. The build experience, as you might expect from the modular line, was incredible. In fact, this is one of the few sets that I felt didn't have any long, tedious section of having to build a bunch of the same exact thing. In part, the build process was aided by having two buildings with wildly different architecture smushed up together, there was never time to get bored because you were always moving on to something completely different every few steps.
With a healthy amount of included minifigures (plus a three-wheeled bike), three fully-detailed floors, and outstanding exterior design, the Tudor Corner is easily one of my favorite LEGO modular buildings of all time (and that's saying something since I own and have built every modular building since the Fire Brigade in 2009! This set earns my highest recommendation.
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