Somewhere in Billund–a tiny town with a gigantic international airport in the middle of Denmark–there’s a magical place that you can’t visit. A fantastic chamber hidden from the public, buried under a house burned down and rebuilt twice by a man with a crazy idea. That man’s name was Ole Kirk Christiansen. And that crazy idea was one of history’s best–an invention that affected the lives of billions of kids around the world for decades to come.
I stumbled upon this secret room in 2008 while visiting the old Lego House. A quiet, elfish woman with a big smile walked me down a flight of black stairs to a locked vault and said: “This is where your childhood dreams rest.” And it was true. She let me in, and I touched those dreams with my own hands. Blue spaceships, yellow castles, white monorails; all sleeping for decades, spooning each other. Inside this room sat all the Lego sets that had made me happy for years.
Today, my childhood dreams rest elsewhere. It’s not as secret, or as magical, but the new Lego House, which has finally opened its doors in Billund, is a fan wonderland on its own right.
There are other areas full of cool Lego displays. One looks like a paleontology museum with giant dinosaurs made of bricks. Another has a huge city model in which you can spend hours exploring different vignettes of life, all brightly illuminated.
My favorite part, however, is a dark room nested in the heart of the complex like a sanctum sanctorum. There, under moody, almost ritual lighting, sit five hundred of the most iconic Lego sets ever produced–complete with their original boxes. Circular touch screens allow you to explore the entire company catalog, going back to the ’60s, so you can find the sets from your memories. It’s called the Vault.
“A wave of emotions took control, hitting my head like a Lego Airbus 380. Dozens of images started to appear in my head, Polaroids of Christmas and birthdays that I thought were faded, completely fresh, color-corrected, and restored for a Blu-ray re-release […] There was my mother and father–who built a huge Lego ferris wheel and the Blue Train for us when we were too young to build it, then never stopped giving us new sets every year–and then my two brothers and my sister, playing on the rug, building all kinds of new and wonderful constructions populated by the strangest creatures. And that smell. The perfect smell of Lego bricks.”
Because, in the end, these shiny bricks aren’t just tools to build giant trees or cities or dinosaurs in a Lego museum. For millions of young (and old) people, these bricks are the material from which our childhood memories are built.
It’s only right that, to design the new Lego House, the company took that into account. It dug out the boxed treasure from the old vault and made it the heart of the new Lego House, a temple to the most powerful drug in the world: Nostalgia.