Review of set 10182: Café Corner
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10182 |
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SET DESCRIPTION
Developed by LEGO fans and designers working together, this detailed and realistic street corner scene features plenty of special colors, rare LEGO pieces and creative building techniques, as well as authentic interior details and modular construction to let you enlarge the neighborhood as your LEGO collection grows.
- Built completely on minifigure scale!
- Includes 3 townspeople minifigures!
- Street base measures 10” x 10” (25.4 cm x 25.4 cm) and building stands over 14” (36 cm) high!
- Realistic features include opening front door, café tables with umbrellas, striped awning, “Hotel” sign, trash can, street light, bench and more!
- Top two stories lift off to reveal inner rooms and staircases!
- Connectors at base of model allow you to join 4 Café Corners together!
SPECIAL ELEMENTS
Plenty of unique or rare elements and colors to ake you drool. This is the only instance of Navy Blue 1x5x4 Arches, the best source of DkStone frogs, and the only place other than the Chum Bucket to pick up Navy Blue 1x1x6 Support Pillars. Lots of DkRed slopes, RedBrown slopes, plates and headlight bricks, DkStone tiles, and multiple colors of 1x1x2 1/3 curved top bricks. Frankly, there are so many pieces here, you’ll need to by one set to display, and one for parts!
IMPRESSION
The Café Corner always looked impressive to me in pictures online. The box was huge and imposing, and was even more impressive than the pictures I had seen. Then, when the model was finally completed in front of me, it was, yet again, even more impressive. The set is a massive block of three stories and solid walls. This is no fancy façade, it is a fully enclosed building, ready for the next tenants to move into the attic space.
The Instructions
Two massive books make up the instructions for the Café Corner. I’ve read elsewhere, and will agree on all points, much of the following. The pages and pictures are huge and easy to read. The parts call-outs and complete piece inventory are nice touches (taken from some other company maybe? ;) ). The only problems come trying to distinguish some of the colors in the steps and parts call-outs. Was that Black or DkStone? Unfortunately, one of my booklets wasn’t stapled that well, and while looking at the number of steps for the review, the center page fell out.
The Ground Floor
| I’ll get all the negatives out of the way first. The first minor complaint I have about the set is the use of a green baseplate. Why green? The exterior is all covered with grey tiles, and the interior floor is left bare. Looking through the windows, or through the grates at the edge of the sidewalk, you are left with a green floor. Very strange. Another problem here is with the glass – the mould point for the glass is a great round blemish in the middle of the pane. Lastly, the molds for most of the tiles are an issue as well now; they have a mold dimple in the bottom, which shouldn’t be a problem as you do not see the bottom, but it shows through in the top of the tiles, such that each piece has a big round dot on the top. Most of my 1x2 LtStone tiles do not have this problem, but most every other tile does (this isn’t a new and unique issue, but detracts from the sets appearance when there is light reflecting off it certain ways). |  |
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Grey tiles spell out ‘Café’ on the sidewalk, there are angled steps into the Café, which has 2 doors leading into it, tables and stools outside, a benh, great lights and awnings, nice decorations over the door and between the windows. The third door, which leads up a set of (very) bulky stairs, is also surrounded with nice lamps and archway decorations. The interior is left empty, though the interior wall is patterned with Navy and Light blue, for cost reasons. It’s Lego, customize away! |
The ‘Hotel’ sign itself goes along with the first floor, and uses lots of nice AFOL style techniques that are great to introduce to the community at wide who may have never seen much of this before. That holds true for much of the model!
Second Floor
| The floors are modular, setting easily on top of each other and being held in place by both sinking the second floor a full brick down from the front of the first floor, and a solitary 1x1 round plate. Once the floor is set in place, it holds nicely, and is easy to remove as well. |  |
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This was the first floor where I noticed the color problems of the set though. The large expanses of brown walls on the back of the Café revealed drastically different shades across the pieces. This turned out to be the major issue of the set. This color variation was also found in the tans and red slopes on the third floor, and to a less noticeable degree in the (bl/gr)ey of the first floor. Hopefully enough has been said about this to Lego Customer Service that they know we care (I know I wrote them about this, but I only received a generic form letter, not addressing the issues, back). |
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Third Floor
Even though the second floor is packed with lots of great elements, it looks plain compared to the first and third. The windows on the third floor are great, using wheel wells and stone frogs as decoration, and tons of dark red slopes and curves to ‘round out’ the roof. The turret with stone falcons puts a nice crown on the whole thing. Tiles for all the window sills, 1z2 Door Rail plates under the falcons, an angled peak, a removable roof with a railing around it, the top floor is packed with goodness. The chimneys were the only element here that I thought were a little weak.
Again, the major issues of the set appear here, with the color variation in tan bricks that make up the large rear wall, and two completely different molds for the DkRed 75 degree slope bricks. Hopefully these ‘transferring production to Eastern European Countries’ pains will subside, and quickly. (For those who care, the differences between these two molds include: Color, slope texture, mold point (inside the hollow stud on one, on the back on the other), and stud (hollow on one, a full hole through the piece on the other)). |
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Likes/Dislikes
Like: Impressive Design, Detail, and Size
Like: Great variety of techniques for an official ‘City’ type set
Dislike: Parts Problems: Color variations, Mold Variations, Bad Mold Design Choices!
CONCLUSION
Parts quality issues aside, the model itself is quite impressive. The design and details are great. There are a few minifigs, certainly enough to go along with the set, which can help provide living space for all those Police and Firefighters you already have in your city. I eagerly await purchasing the Green Grocer, which improves upon the Café Corner’s strong points, and fleshes out some of the weaker aspects (no interiors, which I don’t think is a big problem). I hope it also alleviates some of the manufacturing issues.
