The Brick Connection – A novice Lego fan explores the great brick world of LEGO

Happy April my fellow LEGO fans!

Spring is in full swing! Even if here in the Mid-Atlantic States the weather can’t decide if winter is over or not.

But we are moving towards warmer weather and that means being able to do more outdoor activities.

You know what’s a fun outdoor activity? Playing with LEGO! Granted I’ve never played with LEGO outside, but it seems like it would be fun. Being creative and innovative while also getting some fresh air…what a great combination!

Plus when you are outdoors, you can build as high as you want to. You have virtually no limits on how big you can build.

What am I getting at?

THIS

That is a two-story house made out of LEGO.

No, it was not built with some specially made giant LEGO bricks. This was built with a few million of your standard 2x4 LEGO bricks.

!!!!!

Some of you may have heard about this brick house. (Haha, now I have that song in my head.) It was built waaaaay back in 2009 for a 6-part TV series called James May’s Toy Stories.

James May is a British television presenter, best known for being a co-presenter on the popular British TV series, Top Gear.

The purpose of James May’s Toy Stories was to showcase popular toys from the past and whether they can be applied to modern day. One of the episodes was focused on LEGO.

May’s modern take on LEGO was to see if it could be the building material of the future. Was it plausible to build a large structure out of LEGO that humans could inhabit? Thus began a lengthy and complicated experiment.

You can watch the 52 minute episode that features the planning and building of the house on Hulu:

I highly recommend you watch it. It’s fun seeing them work through all the problems in the planning and building stages and then the last 12 minutes is James May exploring the house and getting ready to spend the night in it. Which he really did. Plus you’ll just be amazed at the engineering feat that this was and wonder how they didn’t go crazy every time they had a setback. (Really, how did they all still have their hair at the end of this? I would have pulled all mine out from stress and frustration.)

If you don’t feel like sitting through a 52 minute episode right now, allow me to give you an overview of everything that happened in the show, along with some extra tidbits I found out through my research.

James May starts the episode by saying that “there are simple spiritual experiences that unite all of humanity in unqualified communal joy.” One of those experiences according to him is the experience of LEGO. And he says that the simple sensation of pressing two LEGO bricks together is a joy that never diminishes. Two thoughts that we can all agree on. 

After introducing the idea of a house made from LEGO, May tells us that he has ordered 3 million LEGO bricks to be able to complete the task. All of them are the standard 2x4 brick, which he calls “the eighter” due to its eight studs. I’ve never heard it called that before. Have you? Must be a British thing.

You might be wondering where he built this LEGO house. Why in the English countryside of course, where it easily blends in…

To be exact, the house was built at Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking, England, which is actually the largest vineyard in England.

The first task for May, especially since this is a two-story house, was to find out if structural beams can be made out of LEGO. He enlists an engineer to try to make a beam of LEGO that can hold his weight. This is not very successful. At the same time, he has someone designing the build for the house. (One does not simply start stacking bricks on top of each other in the hopes of building a life-size house without some major planning beforehand. )

Eventually the engineers and designers working with May have to request that the LEGO structure be built with wooden beams for safety reasons. This is not exactly what May wanted, but in order to use their designs, the designers have to sign off on them. And if something goes wrong, they are responsible. So in order to get approval and go ahead with the building, wooden beams are used to outline the house.

But the LEGO bricks are not attached to the beams in anyway, they just sit on top and around them. So the beams are really just a precaution and not vital to the house being able to stand on its own. While James May is determined (somewhat jokingly) to prove that wood is so last century, I don’t think it’s a big deal to use non-LEGO material for this build. All buildings use more than one type of building material, be it wood, metal, concrete, bricks, other building stuff. (Can you tell I don’t work in construction?)

But May was very serious about only using LEGO for his house. In fact he worked with an interior designer to have all the furniture inside the house made of LEGO bricks too. Of course, this is a little excessive since no one that lives in a stone brick house has their furniture made only out of those same bricks, especially not a bed or chair. But I appreciate May’s enthusiasm for the project and commitment to using only LEGO.

This commitment leads to many amusing interactions with the woman he hires as the interior designer for the house. She is able to build beautiful pieces of furniture out of LEGO bricks, but struggles to make them structurally sound. Meaning they can sit there looking pretty, but no one can actually sit in them. She gets better at this after lots of trial and error.

Here is James May with his LEGO bed and slippers:

So how was the LEGO house designed you might be wondering. Well to make things easier, they broke it down to building blocks made of LEGO bricks. Sound confusing? It isn’t. Using the 2x4 LEGO bricks, they built a “block.” See the picture below of said block (with some raindrops on it.)

The blocks make up the walls of the house. To build the 3,800 blocks May requested help from the public. He got over 2,000 people to show up to help him build the blocks. Many people actually had to be turned away because they didn’t have enough space for everyone.

Here is a picture of the many completed blocks.

Each hollow block consisted of 272 standard 2x4 bricks. They were 12 bricks long by six wide and eight bricks high.

Once those were done, it made the building of the house a bit easier. Even so, the project experienced multiple setbacks including a LEGO brick shortage, that forced them to order another half million bricks.

Here is the house being built:

Despite the project taking a month longer than expected, on September 17^th, 2009 the house was complete and on September 18^th James May spent the night in his very own LEGO house.

This part of episode was really fun, so if you want, skip to the 38 minute mark to see May explore the house, have a little party, and get ready for bed.

May even had some real estate appraisers take a look at it. They were not impressed(in terms of it being a realistic living space). But May also had an art appraiser take a look and he valued it at a half million pounds (British money). By 2016 standards that is about 700,000 American dollars. Not bad!

The sad ending to this cool story that is not covered in the show is that less than a week after being built, they began dismantling it.

The structure was never meant to be permanent since the vineyard needed the space back eventually for vines, but it was hoped that the house could be moved to a permanent location. Unfortunately a move to LEGOLand in Windsor fell through because they realized it would cost 50,000 pounds to dismantle and reassemble the structure. LEGO fans tried to make an appeal through Facebook to find someone willing to purchase it, but nothing ever came of it.

Unfortuantely LEGOLand was very late in telling the production team that they wouldn't be able to take it and since the proper legal permission was never attained to build the structure in the first place, it had to be taken down almost immediately.

According to a Daily Mail article, James May "had hoped an art gallery, a children’s home or a wealthy private collector might have come forward for the house. But anyone hoping to make money from it would have faced legal problems as LEGOLand has an exclusive licence to use the plastic bricks as a public attraction in Britain."

In the end, it had to be taken down, and on September 22, 2009 they started demolition. The three million plus LEGO bricks were donated to charity. 

And there you have it. The story of the LEGO house. A short-lived but wonderfully imaginative and grand undertaking that will at least live on in posterity through this episode of television.

Did any of you hear about this story back when it was happening? Are you sad they couldn’t find a permanent place for it?

I am! Seems to me they should have found a better building location in the first place that would have given them more time to figure out what to do with the completed structure. What a waste!

Don’t waste your imagination LEGO fans. Go get some fresh air! And while you’re outside, try building a humongous LEGO structure of your own. The sky is literally the limit. Building permits be damned!

Thanks for reading!

Until next time…go get you and your LEGO bricks some fresh air!

*Compliments, general feedback, and constructive criticism are welcome. Any haters that are gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate can go step on some Lego with their bare feet.*