Name: Beach House (#4996)
MSRP: $34.99
Pieces: 522
Price Per Piece: $0.067
LEGO Description
Need to get away? Relax in your very own beach house! This colorful building is packed with fun and realistic details, from the big sunlit windows to the barbecue and umbrella. Includes instructions for rebuilding into a cozy café or towering apartment building! Second floor lifts off to see stairs and fireplace on the first floor! Second floor has a balcony and a skylight that opens! Outside there is a patio with table, umbrella and chairs, and even a barbeque grill with chicken! Realistic details include mailbox, doorbell, flowers, walkway, light fixtures, chimney, tree and lots of windows! Beach House stands over 6.5" (17cm) high and includes a 5" (13cm) x 10" (25cm) baseplate
let's take a look at the box first. The front shows the picture of the main beach house, with small pictures of the other 2 builds.
The back of the box has a picture of all three builds this set includes instructions for. There are also 3 detail shots of some of the nicer details
This set has 3 full size instruction books:
As with all the creator sets it does not really contain any extremely rare pieces. So there are a lot of pretty standard bricks in this set, here are some of the rarer pieces it contains:
There is a nice variety of windows/doors:
The Beach House
Here is the entire build, the large amount of windows in this set make for a very open build. There are some really cool details. Like for instance the mailbox, grill and the satellite dish.
The trees and flowers kind of bug me, even though you can see what they are it would have been nice if they just used some more of the realistic pieces. Like just the plain lego flower or tree.
This set was really designed to be viewed from the front. The window in it almost seems like an afterthought because they had a window left from one of the other builds.
Here is a picture taken straight of the front, the roof comes off at the gray line, but all the pictures I took of that were too fuzzy to put in a review :( The interior however is pretty much empty which really makes it a mood point that you can remove the roof. They do however add have some nice exterior detail like for instance the mailbox.
You can take of the entire roof as mentioned before as well as flip it open, here is a picture of the open roof. My son really likes the flipping roof as it allows for easy access with some of our other minifigs.
Here is the terrace setup, I really would have liked the table to be minifig scale, but the minifigs are going to have to drink their coffee standing :)
I really like the grill, it's a very simple design but it adds some cool detail to the build.
The cozy café
I really liked this build, the main reason being that there is some nice detail on the inside. Which really increases the playability for my son. However I am a bit dissapointed that the roof only flips open, but does not come off. The Cool details make more then up for this though.
The Café also has a more detail on the back then the Beach house. Again the large amount of windows really makes for a very nice and open building with relatively easy access.
I would have liked the balcony to be a little bit bigger, as right now there might be room for an ant ot two. The diagonal door is kind of neat. it hinges on two little 1x1 round studs.
The roof flips open an allows you to reach inside, when you close the roof it blends in nicely and the extra windows in the roof allow a lot of light to enter the bar.
Now let's take a look at the bar inside of café, I really think that they are making some cool use of regularly standard bricks. The meat heater and beer fountain are just cool finishing touches.
The towering apartment
The last build is completely different from the previous two, this seems to be modeled after the older city sets with the wide open back and small rooms.
The balconies are a nice size and a minifig can easily stand on them and look down on the rest of Lego city. It would have been nice though if he would have been able to get to the balcony through a door instead of the 'my hand express'. The small windows that stick out of the front are actually double windows which adds some nice depth to the build.
The ground floor contains a mailbox, the second floor contains a computer on a desk with a chair, the top floor contains a sofa and a little table.
Compared to the other two builds the outside lacks some detail.
CONCLUSION
I give this set a 9/10, because of the serious scale issues this set has, however with some small modifications it can easily be adjusted to fit minifgs. The major pros of this set are that you get instruction from 3 very different buildings. You also get a nice assortment of base bricks at a cheap price 6.7 cents per piece. I would really recommend this set to anyone even if you are not interested in the builds the low price point makes it a good set for obtaining lots of pieces. You can buy this set for around 30$ on amazon (free shipping and no sales tax).
