Like the city where it’s located, my Lego town, Little Brick Township, suffers from a massive housing shortage. This is not helped by Lego’s annual releases in the Modulars series, which prioritize restaurants, shops, hotels, museums, and police and fire stations. (Yes, all these municipal and commercial buildings are important, but releasing the police station but not a school, a library, or a hospital shows some questionable priorities.) Yes, a townhouse came out back in 2011, and some of the stores and restaurants feature small apartments upstairs, but they’re never enough for the dozens of minifigures who make Little Brick Township their home.
I was disappointed to find out that Lego’s 2026 release, the 11371 Icons Shopping Street continued this pattern. The Shopping Street includes two attached angled buildings — one sand green and white and containing a two-story music store focused on equipment for marching bands, and the other dark orange and dark tan and containing a furniture store with the carpenter’s workshop upstairs. The lone residential space, on the third floor of the sand green and white side, is a bedsit — a bed, a chair and end table, and a bathroom that is inexplicably surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows.
Given the regime-induced combination of runaway inflation and flatlined job growth, it seemed like an extravagance to buy two copies of the $250 Icons Shopping Street in order to create two full-sized apartments, but my Bricksters deserve only the best. For the third floor apartment (which in Europe would be considered the second floor), I repeated the exterior of the story below, which has the upper part of the music store and the carpenter’s workshop, separated by a door. My interior is completely different, however. In the place of the music store, I have a sitting area with a daybed (made from the extra bed in the second copy of the bedsit) and a workspace underneath a loft bed. I used a Friends Nova’s bedroom for the workspace of the resident couple, who make their living creating video games.
In the pace of the carpenter’s workshop, I built a bathroom that is separated by a wall and a door from an eat-in-kitchen. For the bathroom, I once again raided the extra copy of the Shopping Street, but the new bathroom isn’t surrounded by windows. It does have one large window, so maybe the new residents should get some shades as well. The bathroom also features a roomy shower, from my stock of spare parts, that I added to the right of the toilet. The kitchen has shelves and a pantry, and the two chairs come from the Lego kit. I ordered the kitchen appliances and the table from lego.com‘s Pick-a-Brick.
The tree in the courtyard comes from the Botanicals Mini Bonsai Trees set. This wisteria was left over when I used a gingko for my daughter’s wedding cake topper. I ordered a pair of goats to help keep the grass clipped in the courtyard and an extra goat for her dowry. (I promise pictures of her cake topper in a future post.)
Having found the bedsit unsatisfying, I decided to make the upstairs apartment a two-story duplex. That meant building a new staircase from extra pieces from the unbuilt second copy of the ground floor. It also meant I lost some space because I needed clearance for the staircase. However, I built a bookcase into the stairwell because the resident of that upstairs apartment is a writer of steampunk fantasy. The bookcase came from a Harry Potter set that I cut up for parts to make my MOC Fashion and Design Boutique. As with the downstairs apartment, I needed a new kitchen and dining table from Pick-a-Brick, and my matching dining chairs were salvaged from the two copies of the chair the carpenter was building in her workshop. I had the carpenter work on a different style of dining chair that I also liked. Finally, I added a comfy chair (an extra copy of a chair for sale in the furniture store) in the windowed room, a more appropriate choice for this light-filled, privacy-free space than a bathroom.
My new Shopping Street thus includes a high-rise apartment — high-rise being relative in my little town. It also necessitated moving the building that once occupied that space in the town to the lower level, since a five-story building did not fit underneath the table. The old building happened to be my first modular MOC, the Radio Station, which looks great across the street from Tudor Corner, the Jazz Club, and the Natural History Museum. It will also look great next to the University of Science, a Bricklink Designer Program set that I helped to promote when it was seeking votes to be made into an official set. There’s a great connection here because the Modular Radio Station is based in part on the Darrin Communication Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where I was a DJ at WRPI for eight years and co-host of two world music programs. The University of Science will be ready this fall and I look forward to adding it to my township underneath the table and next to the radio station.
Enjoy the pictures of the new building. I hope Lego decides to create more homes for their minifigures in the future to alleviate their housing crisis!
