Harry Potter

12 Grimmauld Place

The house that hides between its neighbours, with a genuinely clever party trick.

Brick Rated Score

4.0/5

Set 76408 · 2022

Pieces1,086

Minifigs9

Year2022

Set number76408

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The verdict

This one won me over on its one big idea.

Push the two plain terraces together and 12 Grimmauld Place vanishes, pull the lampposts apart and it slides back into being, exactly the way the Order's headquarters behaves in the books. It's shallow and the price stings a little for what you get, but nine minifigs and that expanding facade make it hard to stay grumpy. If you love the darker middle of the story, this LEGO® set is an easy yes.

Best for: Order of the Phoenix fans who want a location no set had ever made before

The full review

What it is

Here is the thing about 12 Grimmauld Place. It's the first time LEGO ever put the Order of the Phoenix headquarters into brick form, and the designers built the whole set around the one detail that makes the location special. In the story the house is hidden by magic, squeezed invisibly between numbers eleven and thirteen until you're told where to look. So this set gives you two plain little terraced houses on either side, and when you push them together, number twelve disappears. Pull the lampposts apart and it slides right back out. It sounds gimmicky written down, but in your hands it's genuinely lovely, and better still it feels sturdy rather than fragile, which is not a given with play features like this.

The catch

I'll be straight with you about the money, because that's where most of the honest reviews landed too. You're paying around 120 dollars for 1,083 pieces and a building that's on the shallow side. It stands over eleven inches tall and looks the part from the front, but it doesn't have a lot of depth behind the facade, and a few reviewers felt the whole house reads smaller than they'd pictured Grimmauld Place in their heads. At 100 dollars this would be an instant recommendation. At 120 it's fair rather than generous. The Black family tapestry, which is one of the best interior touches, is also done with two large stickers rather than printed parts, and if stickers make you sigh, you'll sigh here.

Who it's for

So who actually walks away happy with this one. If your favourite stretch of the series is the darker middle, Order of the Phoenix and into Deathly Hallows, this fills a gap on the shelf that literally nothing else did before it. The minifig lineup alone is a strong pull, and the reveal function is the kind of thing you'll show off to anyone who wanders past. If you're chasing pure piece-count value or you want a deep, room-heavy dollhouse to pose scenes inside, you might feel a bit short-changed and you'd be right to shop around on price. For everyone else, especially fans of the house itself, it's an easy set to love. It's retired now, so secondhand is the route, and prices have climbed well past the original tag.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build breaks into the two decoy terraces and the main house, and it moves along at a friendly pace without ever getting fiddly. The clever engineering all lives underneath, where a sliding mechanism lets number twelve retract and reappear on rails, and the satisfying part is how simply it's done, a play feature you can actually trust not to jam. The interior fills out room by room, Sirius Black's room, the kitchen, the piano where Ron and Hermione practise, so there's a steady drip of little reveals to keep you going rather than one long wall of repetition. It's an approachable build, aimed at the 8 plus mark, but with enough character that grown fans won't feel like they're on autopilot.

On parts, the headline is the new broom mold that debuted across the Summer 2022 Harry Potter wave, with only the bristles molded so the whole thing flexes and looks far closer to the on-screen brooms. The Black family tree tapestry is the visual centrepiece, two large printed stickers detailed enough that you can actually pick out individual family members, which is a real feat even if you'd have preferred proper printing. Add nine minifigs into 1,083 pieces and the value maths tilts toward the figures rather than the brick, which is exactly the trade a lot of licensed sets ask you to make. It's a minifig-forward box more than a parts-monster one.

Fun facts

01It's the first LEGO set to ever recreate 12 Grimmauld Place, the hidden headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix.
02The whole set is built around the Fidelius-style reveal, push the neighbouring terraces together and the house physically vanishes between them, just like in the story.
03It was designed by George Gilliatt and carries a strong 4.2 out of 5 community rating on Brickset from over 160 owners.
04It debuted a new, more accurate broom mold with only the bristles molded, which rolled out across several Summer 2022 Harry Potter sets.