Lego House is the self-styled ‘home of the brick’. A brick’s throw from the buildings Lego started in, it’s a gleaming institution that dominates the centre of the company’s home town of Billund in Denmark.
Although there are plenty of large Lego displays, including an alpine scene, giant dinosaurs, a huge waterfall of bricks and a multi-floor spanning tree, the majority of the 12,000 square metre house’s spaces – all built using the proportions of the original brick – are for people to create stuff in using many of the 25 million Lego bricks on site. But those people haven’t been able to take their creations home – until now.
Inspired by the Lego Masters TV show, the Masters Academy is inside a space formerly occupied by a “boring conference room” and replaces the aforementioned boringness with a whole lot of fun in a space that has TV studio-style lighting and background music while you complete tasks to give the feel of urgency.
I was lucky enough to be one of the first to take part in the sessions along with other media and it was a lot of fun. A host guided us through the process and injects a sense of urgency build against the clock.
“I hope you really enjoy today. Buckle up and play. Let your creativity go loose, and thank you for coming and celebrating this moment with us”, says Kathrine Kirk Muff, head of Lego House before we enter the room. You first go into a holding space where you are briefed on some dos and don’ts (Lego would like to keep the look of this room a secret) before a garage door-sized door slides back to reveal the Lego Masters Academy room.
So what’s it all about?
You learn building techniques using a specific set of Lego bricks laid out for you, though some more freeform creations enable you to dip through a pre-selected trolley of extra bricks.
“This is a truly big milestone for us,” adds Søren Bering Andersen, Lego House’s rather grandly-titled ‘head of experience’. “We’re confident that all Lego fans around the world will appreciate what we have done This is by far the most complex experience that we have ever done. It’s by far the biggest investment that we have done, and we are extremely proud of the result.
And, yes, you’ve guessed it, you can take your creations (plus any of the spare bricks from your table) home. Early tasks during the session have instructions on the screen, but as you learn the amount of help decreases!
Andersen commented specifically on this “One of the things that I’m really, really, really excited about – because it’s one of the things that we hear a lot from our guests – is that [in Lego House you build something] and then you cannot take what you’ve built back home. Everything you build in [the Lego Masters Academy room], we encourage you to bring it back home.
“Either display it or actually, even better, keep iterating, keep using what you have learned and build further with it.”
What you learn
A couple of intermediate sessions are available for now – levels 2 (age 5+, 199 DKK – around $31, £23) and 3 (age 10+, 249 DKK – around $39, £29) – and Lego is exploring how to introduce more basic and more advanced sessions in 2026. You can have several people at one table in the Academy room, meaning it’s great for going with family or a few friends.
I did both sessions during my visit to Lego House and found I learnt a great deal – especially Level 3, which was how to build using the Studs Not On Top (SNOT) technique, where you build a framework to make round or oblong-shaped builds. I was guided through how to use this technique to create some fruit shapes to start with, and I was then able to apply this technique to a larger creation with the same shape – I built a submarine.
The Level 2 session focused on building a simple model of a person and the adaptations you could make to it to make it taller for example. I was then given free rein to build a person of your own design using the techniques I learned from the first one.
Andersen also talked about the potential of the level four sessions in the future. “That’s where we deep dive into expert building techniques. We’ll also look to add maybe one or two more levels than that, so [it’ll be] something that evolves all the time. We want to give the guests an opportunity to pick, first of all, the level that they are at, but also what they’re interested in.”
“We haven’t quite decided how we will conduct [those sessions]. It will be where we deep dive into something. It could also be a theme, maybe, like, could we deep dive into Star Wars but it might also be we deep dive into building flowers or whatever. So we haven’t quite defined that yet.”
“We had always wanted to do something like this in Lego House, like we have a lot of free building in the experience zones, and that’s super, super great, and we have some truly unique experiences up there. But we also wanted to create that learning setting.
“And then we looked at Lego masters and said OK, this is actually something where we can create a really significant experience around it. We wanted to create something that was fantastic, over the top, really worth traveling for and not just a classroom.” You can see some footage of the Masters Academy being built, too.
Elsewhere, Lego House also announced its latest Masterpiece Gallery – an annually revised room filled with incredible fan-built models. This year’s selection features 17 exhibitors from 12 countries and features wall-mounted 2D and 3D artworks alongside the usual slew of large-scale models. Check out the latest models.
