Hogsmeade at winter time???

I normally don’t cover new LEGO set announcements, unless they are from the Harry Potter theme. But today I’ll make an exception. LEGO has just revealed this year’s Winter Village set: Elf Club House (set 10275). While I might be a must-buy item for my Winter Village collection anyway, when I saw the shape of the building I immediately thought of Hogsmeade. Here are my thoughts…

Recovering from my illness, I thought I would write up a review of the LEGO Harry Potter – Build your own Adventure Book, which is the only Harry Potter LEGO I’ve got in my isolation. I was playing this morning with alternative builds using the limited supply of bricks that came with the book, and found the 1x2x2 tan slopes would make a nice micro-scale Hogsmeade skyline.

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Setting that aside I started seeing posts in my social media feeds about the new 2020 LEGO Winter Village set just revealed. And when I saw it I immediately thought – this could be a Hogsmeade house!

Elf Club House

The 2020 Winter Village set is known as 10275 – Elf Club House. But with the steep sloped roof and tall brick chimney it looks very much like many of the buildings in Hogsmeade.

For comparison, here is a photo of Hogsmeade from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (Universal Orlando Resort).

It does come with four (house) elves and a reindeer (using the same mould as Harry’s stag patronus).

For those interested, see below for regional pricing and links to more details:

• Elf Club House [USA] – US$99.99
• Elf Club House [CA] – CA$139.99
• Elf Club House [UK] – £84.99
• Elf Club House [DE] – €87.72
• Elf Club House [FR] – €94.99
• Elf Club House [DK] – DKK799.00
• Elf Club House [AUS] – AU$149.99
• Elf Club House [NZ] – NZ$169.99

The set will be available from 1 October 2020.

Hogsmeade in Winter

It is tempting to buy 2-3 and turn into a winter Hogsmeade scene. But with my luck, LEGO will probably release a Hogsmeade set next year then (for example capturing the Deathly Hallows scene where the trio sets off the Caterwauling Charm, revealing their presence to the death eaters – but escaping them with the help of Aberforth Dumbledore). So I’ll probably just buy one and try to build matching buildings from by own brick collection instead. That will involve changing the facade to an all stone look.

What are your thoughts? Just perfect – or too expensive for the purpose? Maybe, wait for the instructions to become available online and source the bricks from Bricklink instead…

I’ll better get back to my book review. Stay tuned for that one…

Till then, Build the Magic!