The model is about four feet long and contains about 14,500 LEGO pieces. Normally when building scale models, I only need to worry about the exterior, but the giant glass greenhouse conservatory on the back of this building was an interesting challenge… I had to build a completely transparent structure, and the interior too!

I usually tuck a “signature brick” like this one somewhere on every one of my models.

Building it

We spent several weeks looking at floor plans and satellite photos, and then a week building the base layer. Everything was then shipped out to the real conservatory, where I built the buildings, landscaping, and the greenhouse interiors over the course of three days as families and kids came by to watch.

I challenged myself to make sure that the beams and structures inside the greenhouse looked the same way that they do in real life. I couldn’t glue anything (since it was built in public and the glues are toxic) and I couldn’t “cheat” the structure by building it thicker or with extra supports because it was transparent. I also had to do this about 1,000 miles away from my studio without the millions of parts I might otherwise rely on while building and designing. I had to make it up on the fly, and it had to be sturdy, visually accurate, precise. I ended up nearly replicating the actual architecture of the conservatory structure very accurately in order for it to look correct. (The one thing I had going in my favor was that I was at the actual building, so I could duck out, walk around, take some mental notes, and then run back in and build what I’d just seen!)