Since I participate in a LUGbulk, I was able to order a big quantity of specific bricks, some time last December. The dominant colour was dark red this year, with a wide variety of useful bricks in that colour, including the elusive masonry textured brick. So with that in mind I looked around for inspiration. And inspiration struck on a visit to Karlskrona, which has lots of old buildings in the center of town. One in particular made interesting use of dark red, so it was an obvious candidate.

All said and done, the bricks arrived and I could finally get started. The design stayed closely to that of the original building, including a jewelry on the bottom left. There’s some SNOT around the windows. I briefly toyed with putting the larger dark red arcs upside down (they don’t yet come in the regular version), but the smaller ones fit better. There is a gated passage through the building, where a motorcycle is stashed away under the stairs.

The jewelry shop is owned by one Llewellyn Strange. I chose his first name simply because it fits with jewels, but it turns out that there was an actual person named Llewellyn Strange. Which will make sense soon. The jewelry is run by a dedidated shopkeeper who sells all kinds of rare and precious items including, indeed, the Arkenstone.

Across the passage is a music shop. Having my father playing in a band, I’ve been in my fair share of music shops even though I stopped playing any long ago. This was an obvious choice after the Serenader gave us such fantastic acoustic guitars, and it was also an opportunity to show off a bunch of instruments.

Upstairs on the left is a small apartment where Llewellyn himself lives in a small cozy space. I was going for a 50’s style apartment but couldn’t find good parts to make teak furniture, so it ended up kind of generic brown instead.

On the other side is a dentist’s office. I notice that Lego stays far away from the dentist theme – probably because there’s not a kid in the world who likes dentists. The closest would be some of the recent Mixels. In the reception I put a bunch of various items, while the dentist’s room has a suitably imposing set of drilling tools.

The third floor houses one big apartment, which has been slightly rebuilt by its current inhabitant: Doctor Strange. Yup, a relative of the jeweler. One of the two main rooms is slightly inaccessible because of the tentacle demon from the nether dimensions who is trying to break in (the demon and various other items were, obviously, taken from the recent, excellent Doctor Strange set). The other houses the various research topics of Strange: time-travelling Persian daggers, lamps for summoning genies, mysterious lava creatures, sentient teapots, and most recently a mysterious book on dragons, sent by an acquiantance in Elvendale.

There isn’t much on the roof. I made a little balcony but it’s more for service than anything else. The roof is mostly flat to accommodate whatever I decide to put on top of it (the Quinjet might leave its perch on Green Grocer to pay Strange a visit). The railing on the back is made from regular long antennas, and on the front partly from a new useful part.

There’s something self-destructive about the way I make new modular buildings without any real space to put them. I might be able to squeeze this one in somewhere, but I’m quickly running out of street. Obviously the solution will be to start looking for a bigger room for my Lego.