Whether you are decorating the interior of the LEGO Modular Buildings, or you are building your own LEGO houses from scratch, working on minifig-scale living-spaces is always fun and challenging. Today I wanted to show you a series of small vignettes by LEGO fan César Soares dedicated to apartment life. 🙂
César shares that while he lived most of his life in a house, a few years ago he had to move to an apartment. Getting used to a smaller space and the noises of neighbors inspired him to recreate apartment life in LEGO form. The kitchen, home gym, laundry room, home office, bedroom, TV room, and living room are arranged into a cell-like structure to highlight the cramped feel of living in an apartment. While the rooms, appliances, furniture and decor are minifig-scale, César opted against including any minifigures to focus only on the living spaces.
The kitchen includes a two-burner stove (made with car tires!), oven, dishwasher, refrigerator, and cabinets around the walls in bright modern colors. The kitchen table uses some rare printed tiles. There are some interesting techniques used here, particularly for building kitchen cabinets.
This apartment-dweller is serious about staying in shape, as they have an entire room dedicated to exercise equipment, including a treadmill, weighs, punching bag, gymnastic bars, jump rope, and more.
The laundry room has a full washer and drier, which means that this apartment must be quite spacious. It includes a full washer and drier, shelves and hangers for clothes and tools, and a space to hang a bike. Notice the interesting technique of using tiles sideways to create the flooring.
Nice little office we got here with an office desk, office chair, computer, desk-lamp, and more. I particularly like the use of the ice-cream scoops piece for crumbled up paper in the wastebasket, and the construction of the rolling office chair.
There are some interesting building techniques used in the bedroom as well. The painting behind the bed features mosaic techniques with wedged cheese-slopes, tiles and a starfish. The bedside cabinet uses 1×2 bricks sideways, with inserted bucket handles to represent drawers. The lamp has a lightsaber-hilt stand, and upside-down bucket shade. And the small red chair got Viking horns for legs.
The focus of the TV room is the large flat-screen TV with speakers and remote. The cozy recliner and other furniture sit on top of a colorful rug made of upside-down tiles for a textured feel. I really like the glass café table, taking advantage of the clear color and curvy shape of a minifig-stand.
César calls the last space the living room, although it would probably be called the dining room in America. It includes a dining table featuring some very creative building techniques, four chairs, and some other furniture pieces. Clever use of the long white tiles clipped in at the top to represent vertical window blinds.
While only these seven cells are included in the apartment life series by César, other interesting spaces could be added as well; like a bathroom, children’s bedroom, home library, music room, and more. Of course, this would only work if the apartment is big enough to include them all. The idea here is to create small, cramped-looking spaces to represent apartment life. I save images like these for future reference when working on the interior of the LEGO Modular Buildings, or other houses. Even a single cleverly built chair, desk, sink, or cupboard can make a significant difference when decorating a living-space.
What do you think? How do you like these small LEGO vignettes? Did you learn any interesting techniques that you could include in your own LEGO homes and apartments? What else you think could be added to the collection to represent apartment living? Feel free to share your thoughts and own ideas in the comment section below! 😉
And you might also like to check out the following related posts:
- LEGO Room Décor & Furniture Designs
- LEGO Baby Toys, Room Décor & More!
- Custom LEGO Instructions by TheBrickLab
- LEGO Creator Assembly Square Review
- Brick City Depot & Brick Builders Pro
- LEGO Tutorials by Back Room Builder
- LEGO Designer Tips: How to Build Columns
- LEGO Designer Tips: How to Build Street-Lamps
Yeah, apartments are basically a necessity in urban areas, although a seven-room apartment would be helpful to avoid the feeling of crampedness…
Way too much clutter in mine, however…
I have lived in apartments for a number of years, but now that we live in a house, I can’t imagine going back. It’s a humble house, but I so much appreciate the space, the yard, the trees, the chirping birds… and not having to smell the cooking or hear the arguments of the neighbors. 😈
Here in Sweden, if you have a middle class income, it’s fairly common to have a countryside house, which you only use on holidays and summer leaves.
On the market, location is everything, so big countryside houses are often a lot cheaper than small city apartments.
I like the libraries and museums in city areas though. The events and cultural offerings, although I might try finding something bigger in some more humdrum suburb, the coming years…
Very interesting. But Sweden is fairly small isn’t it? It shouldn’t take that long to drive into the city for cultural events. When I lived in Chicago, it took almost an hour just to go downtown. 😀
Well, that depends on where you live… Sweden’s about the size of California, but more oblong. There are a lot of mountains, though, and the upper half gets quite cold during the winter half year, so the country’s rather sparsely populated, relatively.
Then, I don’t have a driver’s license, anyway…
Hm… sounds a lot like Canada; cold up North, mountains, sparsely populated. You guys are a hardy bunch! 😀
I think it’s roughly on the same latitude.
If you have a globe, you can see that Sweden’s actually pretty big.
On a world map, well, they usually follow the Mercator projection, so Sweden’s roughly about the size of Africa, which might be a tad bit misleading…
It’s farther up north than Canada, actually, but the flows of the Gulf stream make the climate more habitable than many other countries at a similar latitude. So the comparison’s still valid.
That’s sounds a bit like what we had in Chicago with the Great Lakes. They made the winters a bit more tolerable, although they were still brutal. We had two feet long icicles covering the windows INSIDE the house. I don’t think I could ever live up North again. Brrr…!!!
Ah, that’s not common here in Sweden, since insulation’s generally pretty good…
High differences between the inside and outside temperatures, though…
Yes, insulation in Europe is so much better!
Ahhh! Love all the little details! I’m surprised though that there is no bathroom? Otherwise, nice apartment!
Yeah, I’m surprised about the lack of bathroom too, as bathrooms are always fun to decorate. Maybe this is one of those apartments with communal bathrooms? 😀
Cool!!!