Visiting the LEGO House in Billund
If ever there was a “children’s” museum, then this is it.
Everyone knows LEGOLAND Billund, the must-see theme park for every LEGO fan and Denmark’s most visited tourist attraction outside of Copenhagen. However, did you know there is a LEGO museum in Billund as well? Inaugurated in 2017 the LEGO House resembles 21 interlocking bricks found in the centre of Billund, a 1.5 km walk from LEGOLAND. And spoiler, it's the dream museum for kids and adults alike!
We knew we had to at least see the LEGO House when visiting LEGOLAND earlier this month but were contemplating the additional 299 DKK (~€40) entrance fee. I am glad we did!
Welcome
The LEGO House website describes the visit as the “ultimate LEGO experience” where “anything is possible.” Great, but what does that mean?
After scanning your ticket, each visitor receives an NFC wristband. This bracelet is central to your visit: it provides unlimited access for the day, so you can leave and enter the LEGO House as you please, but you also scan it at the various activities in the house. After your visit, you can download your pictures and videos from the day.
Enter via the winding stairs. In the centre, the Tree of Creativity, one of the world’s largest LEGO constructions: 15 meters tall and over 6 million bricks!
Arriving at the top brick floor there are 3 enormous dinos: one in DUPLO, one in SYSTEM and a third in Technic. On the sides: display cases with builds of AFOLs. The creativity in these masterpieces is incredible!
Experience Zones
The house has four “experience zones” with a variety of bricks to play with. That sounded tedious, and I thought we would be out quickly. Sure, brick building is fun but 4 times fun? I was seriously wrong. We stayed the entire day and had tons of fun. Why? Guided play!
I was amazed at how well this worked. The earlier visitors’ builds on the shelves give you inspiration (staff members constantly collect the ugly ones and leave the nice ones, so you feel everyone is a master builder). The builds are small and easy enough to keep everyone interested, and since the whole family is building, we were constantly showing and helping each other.
This was key: we were playing together!
Red Zone
The red zone has a lot of bricks and a huge colourful brick waterfall. Take bricks and construct something, simple. When finished, scan your wristband at one of the photo kiosks and take a picture. Leave your build on the shelf if you wish. There is a breakout area with multiple tables with smaller yellow and black parts where you assemble a bee (or many bees, we went a little overboard here).
Yellow Zone
The yellow zone has you create a small 2D monster on a baseplate. Slide it into one of the machines, scan the wristband, and watch your dancing monster come to life. Next, you build a flower (it is remarkably easy to make a decent flower if LEGO selects the pieces you can use). Don’t forget to take a picture of the flower before moving on to the next section where you construct a fish (this one was hard). Scan the build and your fish swims to life in the virtual aquarium.
Green Zone
The green zone: 3 stunning dioramas and many small miniature stories to discover. Absolutely amazing! Like LEGOLAND’s Miniland, but at minifig scale. Oh, wait for the room to go dark and admire the dioramas light up! Off in the corner, you can make a stop-motion movie in the Story Lab. The children build the minifig characters for the movie while the parents wait. Your movie station has a prebuilt backdrop, and you bring the set to life with different camera angles. Add music and, since they scan the bracelets, the credits are personalized automatically. This zone also has a section where you can build your own minifigure. Pose the minifig, choose a magazine cover and - snap - your own famous minifig.
Blue Zone
The blue zone. Control a LEGO robot to drill holes, plant, and water seeds. Build a car and race it against each other or attempt to make it leap through a circle (our multi wheeled, solar powered contraption crashed multiple times). Play SimCity by building a few micro-scale buildings and placing them in the city with the other visitors’ buildings.
Museum
Oh, right, almost forgot, there is an actual museum too. Down in the basement you can find the origin story of LEGO from Ole Kirk Christiansen's wooden duck to the custom LEGO sets handed out during COP26. Then there are iconic sets from each decade. I knew this would be a journey down memory lane. After boring my kids to death with “this was my favourite 1980s set, oh, wait this one was even better, see that one, we had that one, oh, look there” they quickly left me alone. A personal highlight, not so for my children. You know, everything was better in the eighties, especially spaceships!
Brick Moulder
On your way out, there is a functioning LEGO brick moulding machine. The machine moulds red 2×6 bricks, packaged in plastic bags. Scan your wristband and get a unique combination to arrange your 6 bricks. These bricks you can take home. There are bags with DUPLO blocks for the smaller ones, but these are not moulded on site.
Tickets
If you plan to visit LEGOLAND, and you should, you can save 34% of your ticket if you buy it online. There is a LEGOLAND combi ticket that allows access to LEGOLAND and the LEGO House, but the price is the same as the online LEGOLAND + separate LEGO House tickets. You can find discounted LEGO House tickets for 269 DKK (~€36) on the LEGO House website if you plan to go on a quiet day or visit in the afternoon.
Parking
There is a paid parking close to LEGO House, but the ‘fjernparkering’ (remote parking) is free and a 1 km walk from the LEGO House. Tip: park here when you visit LEGOLAND and save yourself the 60 DKK (~€8) LEGOLAND parking fee. The LEGO House fjernparkering is a 1.5 km walk from the LEGOLAND entrance.
Food
The LEGO House has its own restaurant, the MINI CHEF, and café, the BRICKACCINO. The latter is your standard coffee and sandwich self-service place, but the MINI CHEF lets you build your own dish of LEGO bricks (each of the 4 bricks stands for an ingredient). Scan your order and pick it up by Robert and Roberta, the serving robots. Don’t forget to book a table for the MINI CHEF, however. Both eateries are on the ground floor and do not require an entrance fee to visit. As many museums in Denmark (to my pleasant surprise) there is a pick-nick area as well, bring your own lunch and save the Krones for the LEGO store.
LEGO Store
The house wouldn’t be complete without its own store. No need for an entrance ticket. The store has a Minifigure Factory (design the body of a minifig, which is printed on a blank minifig body piece) and Mosaic Maker (turn your photo into a LEGO mosaic). Noteworthy are the wall decorations in the store, which are beautiful dioramas of Danish scenes, better than most builds in LEGOLAND IMHO. Visit the store early, it gets busy near closing. Don’t worry they will keep your bags for the day.
Finally: store exclusives! This is where they got me. The store has a several exclusive LEGO sets. The best known one being the model of the LEGO House itself: “LEGO House Architecture (21037)”. I hadn’t bought any sets for my adult self yet, but I, eh, gave in.
Take a small detour back to the parking at the end of the day via the Symbolik park and daydream about working at LEGO’s main campus.