Lego has created a playful collection of homeware accessories with a grown-up look. Designed in collaboration with Danish brand Room Copenhagen, the collection includes picture frames, wall hangers, book racks, and desk drawers—all made of wood. And because this is Lego, the items are scaled versions of the iconic bricks, meaning the picture frames and the desk drawers can stack. With a single desk drawer that costs $218 a pop (compared to $20 for the plastic version), Lego seems to be eyeing a different kind of market worthy of its Nordic origins.
[Photo: Lego]True Lego fans may know this isn’t the first time the company has played with wood. In fact, Lego actually began in 1932 in a Danish carpentry workshop, and Lego bricks were made of wood for several decades. As plastic became available in Denmark after WWII, Lego purchased a plastic injection molding machine and by the ’60s—after a series of fires burned down most of the company’s wooden inventory—Lego had fully embraced plastic.
[Photo: Lego]Now the homeware collection can be seen as a sort of return to the source. In 2018, Lego launched a woodenMinifigure, but aside from that one toy, this new collection is the first time the brand has worked with wood at that scale in more than 60 years. The items are made from European red oak certified by the nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council and are available in a light or dark oak finish. Each piece comes with the brand’s proprietary round studs, which allow pieces like the desk drawers or the picture frames to slot into one another. Other products, like the wall hangers ($99 for a set of three) or the book racks ($140 in dark oak) can’t be stacked, but all of them have Lego written all over them (both literally and figuratively).
“We wanted the entire wooden collection to be compatible with the classic collection, so that they can be displayed together,” says a spokesperson from Room Copenhagen. (More items are in the pipeline, but we’ll have to wait for details.)
[Photo: Lego]This isn’t the first time Lego and Room Copenhagen have come together. For years, the two companies have collaborated on a wide range of storage solutions made out of plastic, from an oversize Legobrick shelfto alunch box with a handleto a winking Minifigurestorage head. With this new collection, Lego is appealing to a more grown-up, design-oriented audience. Though it remains unclear (and unlikely) whether the material will trickle down to Lego’s iconic brick toys.
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