A blurb about the set. This is a quick/in-depth review of the 946-piece LEGO 42687 Liann's Family House set from the Friends line, retailing for $69.99.
TL;DR Quick Stats:
- Retail Price: $69.99 USD (per BrickEconomy)
- Pieces: 946
- Mini-dolls(s): Liann, Nova, Michelle, Paisley
- Sticker Sheet: Yes
- Pros:
- Exquisitely detailed dollhouse
- Some bright new colors
- Adorable pets
- Cons:
- Minidolls (unless you're fans of those)
- Some color/build detail issues
- Final Score: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
Assembly:
Bag #1 - Liann, Nova, skate ramp start
Bag #2 - Skate ramp finish
Bag #3 - Michelle, first floor start
Bag #4 - First floor midway
Bag #5 - First floor finish
Bag #6 - Paisley, second floor start
Bag #7 - Second floor midway
Bag #8 - Second floor finish
Leftover Pieces
Interesting Steps:
- 59: Stacking tea saucer pieces in a cabinet not only fit better than 2x2 plates or tiles would, they also look like a stack of plates.
- 72: The little houseplant build (my guess is it's a Dracaena Warneckii, or something similar) is simple but effective, using 3L lightsaber bars as stalks, and leaf pieces to evoke palm-like foliage.
- 94: This shows a great use of the new willow-style leaf parts—upside-down! My one quibble with this is that the three-leaf part at the top is a different shade of green, drawing the eye to it and breaking up what otherwise would have been quite a nice (and uniform) topiary shrub. It would have been less of an issue if the new leaf parts were also in different shades of green, but that would have likely added to the cost of the set.
- 44: Here we build a desk and a drawing tablet, complete with a stylus for digital painting. If I were designing it I wouldn't have had the keyboard "sunk" into the desktop like this (though I did have to take a similar approach in my "Urban Jungle" MOC due to space constraints). This shot also shows the house's little bathroom quite well.
Interesting Techniques:
- It's neat to see that the thickness of 1 plate + 1 tile = the space inside of a panel bracket. This not only holds the skate ramp's back wall in place, but also means it can be removed and changed easily, without having to deal with complicated SNOT arrangements. I could see this technique being useful for shop signs or theatre or photo backdrops, with mosaicked letters and scenery being swapped out easily.
- In the brick-built street lamp, white SNOT bricks within trans-yellow slopes and plates give it a nice glow.
- Using clear 4x4x3 quarter cylinder pieces sideways for a glass vault or arched skylight is a nice trick, and the bricks and slopes in trans-light blue and trans-dark pink make for a subtle stained-glass effect too.
Interesting Pieces:
- The new plant plate with drooping layered leaves, 9 lime, 3 bright green:
- Masonry profile 1x2 brick in warm pink, new color, 34 in set:
- Pet flap door in blue violet, a new color for this part:
Pain Points:
- The paint roller uses a Technic pin and spacer for the brush roller instead of a 1x1 round brick. I suspect this is because a bright pink 1x1 round brick was only ever in three sets from 2016, whereas a bright pink Technic spacer was in four more-recent sets, not counting this one. The problem arises, however, with the way the paint roller is constructed. If assembled as directed in step 22, the roller slides easily up and down the handle's bar—as shown in the picture. Simply flipping the Technic parts 180° and inserting the roller into the other end of the pin not only keeps the roller more securely on the handle, but also results in the white edge showing on the end, like part of the brush that hasn't yet been stained by paint. This is because the inside of the pin is cylindrical, except inside the 1/2 pin end, where it dimples to a squarish profile, which in turn is what grips whatever is inserted.
- Setting 1x1 tiles is always a bit of a pain, especially needing to make sure they're all straight. Sliding along their edges with the side of a brick separator can help.
- The roof is quite interesting. First, I do appreciate the use of wedge plates to accommodate the glazed dormer (see Interesting Techniques above), and the blue plates under the blue violet 1x2 half circle tiles gives a nice shadow under the shingles. My main complaint is with the dark azure 1x1 quarter circle tiles used for the edges. They're distractingly bright, and though there are several medium azure pieces in the façade (for example, the window frames) the only other dark ones are in the corner of the pavement by the skate ramp (perhaps indicative of spilled paint). One solution would simply be to have quarter circle tiles in blue violet (though this might add unduly to the cost); another approach would be to scatter a few dark azure 1x2 half circle tiles in among the blue violet ones, so it looked more like the slates were uneven, rather than that there simply weren't the right parts in the desired colors; a third solution would have been to just have all the roof tiles be dark azure and do away with the blue violet entirely. Personally, I prefer the first solution, as increasing the color availability for parts (especially such small and useful ones as 1x1 tiles) is always a good thing.
- The outside of this build suffers from its single-wall construction. On the one hand, this means that only a single line of bricks, plates, and other parts (like the blue cabinet pieces seen here) are needed to build up the structure. On the other hand, it also means that anything you put in for one side (like those same cabinets) is reflected on the other. You can see a good example of this in the single white plate up in the gable section. This is the beam that stretches across the attic space and supports the roof hinges; if it were light nougat to fit in with the outside wall, it would look weird on the inside (where all the beams are in white). And the other option, having double walls, eliminates the problem and even allows you to have different colors inside and outside, but it doubles the space taken up by walls, and more than doubles the amount of bricks you need to make the walls (since the outer shell needs to envelop the inner shell).
Play Features:
- Rather like a traditional dollhouse, the play here is by moving the minidolls around their environment (e.g. cooking in the kitchen, using the skate ramp, or tending to their pet amphibians).
- That said, the set is arranged to fit with LEGO's "Build Together" approach, allowing the build to be divided up among three people: the first two bags are the simplest/shortest build, but also come with two minidolls; the next three bags build the first floor and have one minidoll, as do the last three bags with the second floor. Each chunk also has a separate instruction booklet, which clearly shows what those instructions and bags go to make. The set is designed so that it doesn't matter in what order these three chunks are assembled, which makes this a great way to add functionality without any sacrifice of form.
My Modifications:
- The lovely galloping horses picture sticker too nice to be relegated to the inside of a wall piece (especially a light nougat one, which might not see much use), so I instead placed it on two 2x3 reddish-brown tiles—approximating a frame—so I could use it to decorate some other wall in the future. I'm not usually a fan of STAMPs (Sticker Across Multiple Pieces), but since 3x4 tiles don't exist, I had to make do.
Final Build (additional photos)
• Overall: An excellently-detailed dollhouse.
Some sets have cool gimmicks (like the Jay's Transforming Car set) and others work to bring a scene to life (like the little Arin vs. Dragonian Battle polybag), but some, like this one, are intended purely for imaginative play. Just as with dollhouses through the ages, the play comes from the child (or, indeed, adult) themselves, moving the little figures around and giving them little lives to live.
To that end, this set has a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, a bedroom, and an outside space, all packed with details. And for those of you (like me) who prefer minifigures to minidolls, the half-brick height difference means that these spaces can just as easily be used by Emmet and his friends as by Liann and hers. There are also a lot of solid building techniques as well, and a lot of good practices to be learned just by building this set. The bright colors can easily be toned down by swapping out parts, and indeed this could serve as a template for a whole host of different style dollhouses.
As a side note, I do intend on doing an investigation and comparison of different dollhouse styles: open back like this one, hinged panel, split in two like the Four Weapons Blacksmith, and others. There's so many ways to build a toy house and have it be accessible, each with its strengths and weaknesses. As someone who intends on building houses of my own as reference for worldbuilding (what does this character's house look like? what about that inn?), such things are important to consider.
Back to the set at hand, the price is fair for such a large and detailed build (as opposed to the barely-sketched-in buildings of the Ninja Vehicle Tree House Battle set), not to mention four minidolls and two pets. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to expand their Friends neighborhood, or indeed anyone wanting a colorful addition to a LEGO City layout. Although it comes with quite a few of the new 2026 parts (or old parts with new colors), I wouldn't recommend getting it just for those pieces, as they can easily be gotten from resellers like on BrickLink.
Score (out of 5 🧱):
- Price: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Process: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Presentation: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Play: 🧱🧱
- Pieces: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Total: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
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