LEGO 42620 Olly and Paisley's Family Houses review (2024)

The magenta ivy on Olly's house reminds me of Virginia Creeper, which turns reddish like that in the fall.

While it looks nice as decoration, it makes me shudder to see it, since my wife and I are allergic to it, and get rashes similar to poison ivy, as we unfortunately found out.

Good review! Honestly, while you mention a lack of detail compared to stand-alone Friends houses, I am genuinely impressed how well the designers were able to furnish two separate houses in a single set. Obviously, there are some sacrifices — neither bathroom has a bath/shower, and Olly's family house does not include a kitchen — but they still definitely make great use of the space provided.

I've gotta admit, it tugged on my heartstrings a bit when I saw some of the older family portraits in Paisley's house featuring her late mother (from whom she inherited her love of music). But even as a single parent, Jonathan seems to do a good job providing for his two daughters. I love that the kitchen has a high chair and a meal tray with dividers for Ella, two details I don't think we've seen in any previous Friends sets. The TV and fireplace in the kitchen also make very good use of space. And while the shared bedroom is not all that spacious, it does offer enough room for the two girls' respective hobbies and interests.

The photo of the two kittens in Olly's house is cute, and I wonder if it's decor that they bought or a photo that Olly took (since his passions include photography and videography as well as fashion design, and we know that he's a cat person). The "Love" welcome mat and decorative pillows feel a little kitschy, but in an earnest way, and definitely remind me of the sort of home decor stereotypical of middle-class suburbanites. By contrast, Olly's room is furnished according to his individual tastes, with a personalized, hand-stitched blanket and a desk for working on his creative hobbies. I also love the plants and the brick edging around Gwen's garden.

The "22" on the tree house is certainly very amusing. Presumably, the actual house 22 would be on the opposite side of the street from the odd-numbered addresses (unless these two families live in a cul-de-sac) but "filling the gap" between their two house numbers like this is definitely the sort of idea I can imagine young neighbor kids thinking up together!

There are also some other great stickered details up there, like the sketch that Olly and Paisley did for what they wanted their tree house to look like (presumably Jonathan had to veto the moat with alligators!) and a plastic tic-tac-toe set. The tree construction itself is simple but effective, making good use of the new 5x4 leaf plates to provide a nice shady canopy, and a cylindrical panel for a fun tree hollow hideout.

All in all, even with these houses' small size, they definitely do a good job evoking the feel of a middle-class suburban neighborhood, in keeping with their map placement just across the canal from the urban core of Heartlake City (I've definitely been greatly appreciating this map feature, and hope it continues to show up in future waves of sets)! There are also plenty of clever and distinctive architectural motifs like the mono-pitched roofs, the sloped windows on the side of Olly's house, and the short, wide front windows of Ella and Paisley's bedroom.

We already knew from some of the maps in last year's sets that Olly and Paisley were neighbors, but this set does a great job taking advantage of that detail —splitting the set in a way that really differentiates it from past Friends houses, while also connecting the two families with fun features like a treehouse where the neighbor kids can hang out and play together, and accessories for Olly and Paisley to collaborate on the designs and music for "Ley-La's" next show!

Thanks so much for the review! Your LEGO Friends reviews are always a delight to read, and I'm definitely looking forward to reading any others you write as the year continues!

@johleth said:
"Are Leo and Olly supposed to be boyfriends?"

I haven't gotten that impression in the animated series. For now at least, I'm pretty sure they're just friends. Leo is also relatively new to Heartlake City, so he and Olly don't have any sort of shared backstory. If anything, Leo tends to spend a lot more time with fellow athletes like Niko. And none of the storylines so far about the current generation of LEGO Friends have really had any emphasis on romantic relationships or even crushes.

But I feel like everyone in Leo and Olly's shared friend group is close enough to reach out to one another if an opportunity arises that lines up with their respective skills and passions, as shown with these two in 41754. So it doesn't surprise me that collaborative efforts like that would end up bringing them closer together. Leo and Olly are also both cat owners, so I'm sure they relate really well to each other on that level as well. I guess it remains to be seen if their friendship leads to any sort of romantic feelings for either of them in the future.

To me the houses look like what the houses of the Flintstones and the Rubbles would look if the series was transferred to modern times (right down to the colour of the tree).

I was wondering why the set didn't include Paisley's mother, until I read @Aanchir 's comment.
Didn't realize that LEGO now isn't content with featuring disfigured pets but also has to drive home a point about broken families. Guess it's not en vogue anymore to have toy worlds as a means of escape from the harsh realities of the real world. I would never want a set with only my mother and myself just because my dad died last year. In my LEGO world he will live forever!

And one last strange thing. How can the tree house be 22, yet supposedly be on the same side of the road? It's a even number, which are on the opposite side of the road from the uneven numbers. Guess it's because it's a made up number anyway, and kids don't care about such nuances.

@AustinPowers said:
"To me the houses look like what the houses of the Flintstones and the Rubbles would look if the series was transferred to modern times (right down to the colour of the tree)."

I don't think that's coincidental —the Flintstones was basically a contemporary American family sitcom wallpapered over with prehistoric motifs (even the theme song alludes to this by calling them "the modern stone-age family"), and so the Flintstones house was probably inspired at least in part by the sort of mid-century modern homes popular in 1950s California, with flat or skillion roofs and rooflines of varying height.

@AustinPowers said:
"I was wondering why the set didn't include Paisley's mother, until I read @Aanchir 's comment.
Didn't realize that LEGO now isn't content with featuring disfigured pets but also has to drive home a point about broken families. Guess it's not en vogue anymore to have toy worlds as a means of escape from the harsh realities of the real world. I would never want a set with only my mother and myself just because my dad died last year. In my LEGO world he will live forever!"

I think the point is to make it clear that a family with only one parent isn't implicitly "broken". This isn't even the first in-house theme with a character who lost a parent at a young age — the same is true of Cole from LEGO Ninjago.

If a kid with only one parent grows up only seeing toys and TV shows that only feature two-parent households (or worse, only portray single-parent households as a miserable tragic scenario) it can give them the impression that there's something wrong or shameful about that… or that the sort of fun, happy scenarios that those shows/toys focus on are only for kids with "normal" families. Which is a rather bleak message to send, even unintentionally!

In general, I think it's much more positive to show that characters like Paisley can be embraced by their friends and loved and supported by their surviving family members, regardless of what sort of family they come from. Plenty of the books and cartoons I grew up with in the 90s and 2000s featured characters with similar backgrounds, so I can't imagine it's a concept that today's kids would be unable to handle.

@TheOriginalSimonB said:
"Fancy not having the number stickers match their sticker numbers."

I think that's a consequence of the clever choice to have the stickers for each house on a separate sheet so people can easily build together. Sticker numbers are typically ordered from top to bottom, one sheet at a time, so in this case Olly's house only uses stickers 1–14 (and therefore doesn't even reach the house number).

@Aanchir : your argument is valid of course, but it requires the kid to be aware of the backstory as laid out in the TV show. Plenty of kids who own these sets have never seen the show though.

I know from experience how devastating losing a parent is - at any age - and I for one would like to have the choice as a kid whether I want to play out the situation like it happened or like I would have wanted it to happen. Nothing wrong with giving kids a choice.

That's one of the reasons why I prefer the LEGO of my childhood. No pre-determined and laid out storylines, no named characters, just sets and minifigs and imagination. If we wanted to change a figure from male to female back then, all we had to do was swap the hairpiece. Want a person with a missing hand, arm or leg, just pull off the relevant part of the figure. Want a figure to heal in hospital after an accident, just put the part back on.
No need for hundreds of different types of faces, hairpieces, etc. Just happy yellow smiley faces everywhere. :-)
Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I have basically stopped buying current LEGO sets and have turned to tracking down highlights from the past I missed out on as a kid via ebay, etc.

@AustinPowers said:
"And one last strange thing. How can the tree house be 22, yet supposedly be on the same side of the road?"

The houses in my town aren't numbered like that.