I have to blame the Heartlake Grand Hotel for this one. I bought it on sale and was immediately struck by all the interesting parts and the neat layout that allowed moving floors around. I started thinking about making a hotel of my own, which was modular not only in terms of fitting in the street, but also having separate rooms that could be rearranged and added to. This means that the house isn’t exactly ”complete”, but I figured that four rooms was a good place to start.

While the modulars generally have working stairs, I decided early on not to bother, as it would require tons of parts for no good reason, and because it would eat into the space available on each floor. I also wanted to use simple 16×16 plates for each room, so there couldn’t be any stairwells. Also, the initial idea was to have different colours for each room, and use up spare parts from other builds, so I designed a fairly simple build that used a selection of specialized parts, but only 1×1, 1×2 and 1×4 bricks for the walls. As it turned out, I had enough sand green and dark blue from previous builds, but I still needed to order extras.

When I had the room design done, I started building the ground floor. Since I’ve been staying at hotels quite a lot in recent years, I knew exactly what I wanted. The floor has a fancy lobby with a reception desk and gold tiled floor. There is an elevator with a working door (activated from outside), and some steps lead down into the hotel bar, where various unwanted figures fill the seats. The curved bar was inspired by the desks in the Brick Bank, but I came up with the striped wall all on my own.

The front isn’t very complex, although the column tops took some figuring out, and ended up being hilariously complex for such a simple function. Since the side walls don’t actually connect to the front, and the top of the side colums are built upside down, I used a hinge piece to hold it all together.

The house was going to have just a simple roof, but another hotel visit inspired a top floor with a balcony, used as a ballroom. It’s nice for displaying lots of figures and uses some fancy new parts. Currently there’s a medieval themed masquerade going on. The glass walls were interesting. I had the folding parts left over from Town Hall, and wanted to use them somehow. It turns out that the sides fit perfectly into a row of jumpers, so the entire part over the glass walls is built upside down.

Finally, the rooms. The modular buildings tend to have all kinds of neat things inside, but stuck in a display you can’t really see it. Inspired by the Ghostbusters HQ, I wanted opening fronts, dollhouse style. But I also wanted to keep the parts count down, and make it possible in any colour. The solution uses basic round bricks and the 1×5 rounded plates.

Taking a look inside, I shoved most of the Big Bang Theory set in here, as I didn’t have anywhere else to display it. I also made a little private jazz club using parts from the Friends hotel. One of the other rooms is currently empty, and the other (with glass brick walls) has some secret activities going on (let’s just say catgirls and whips are involved).

I will probably add some floors to this as I find more things to display in it, but for now I’m quite happy with how it came out.