LEGO Ideas and CUUSOO

Family Tree

A little brick-built tree you fill with your own photos and keep changing forever.

Brick Rated Score

3.9/5

Set 21346 · 2024

Pieces1,040

Minifigsn/a

Year2024

Set number21346

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The verdict

This one won me over slowly.

It's not the flashiest LEGO® set on the shelf, but the idea underneath it (a tree you hang your real photos, ticket stubs and notes on) is quietly lovely, and the customizing never really ends. The repetitive leaf work and the missing minifigures hold it back from greatness, so it lands as a very good display piece with a genuine soft spot in my heart. If you want something personal on a shelf rather than a puzzle to solve, this is your set.

Best for: Sentimental builders who want a personal, ever-changing display piece

The full review

The whole point of this set clicked for me the moment I understood it isn't finished when the instructions run out. The Family Tree is a red-and-orange brick tree, roughly 29cm tall, with 16 little hanger pieces you use to clip in your own photos, notes, ticket stubs and paper keepsakes. So it stops being a LEGO® set on a shelf and turns into something that carries actual memories, and it keeps changing as you add to it. That's a warm idea, and it's rare. Most sets are a one-and-done build. This one wants to grow old with you.

It came out of the LEGO Ideas x Target 'What does family mean to you?' challenge, where Filipino fan designer Ivan Guerrero (you might know him as Bulldoozer, the same person behind 123 Sesame Street) won the fan vote in 2022. Model designer Laura Perron built it out to 1,040 pieces for the official release. The base opens into a hidden three-section storage compartment that's packed with spare flowers and tiny extras, so you can restyle the whole thing for spring, autumn, whatever mood you're in.

Now for the honest bits, because there are a few. The foliage as it comes is red and orange, which gives it an autumnal look that's pretty but not the fresh green some folks expect, so you'll be digging in that storage box to change it. The build itself asks you to attach a lot of leaf and flower elements across three separate branch sections, and reviewers were blunt that this stretch gets tiresome and slow. It isn't a clever engineering build, it's a patient decorating one. And the thing almost everyone flags: there are no minifigures, none, even though the binoculars, roller skates, food and magnifying glass are all built to minifigure scale. It's a genuinely odd call and the little figures are sorely missed. At 79.99 for 1,040 mostly small pieces, the value is fair rather than generous.

So who ends up loving this. If you're a sentimental sort who wants a personal, ever-changing display piece to fill with your own photos, you'll adore it and probably tinker with it for years. If you live for tricky techniques and satisfying mechanisms, the endless leaf-clipping will test your patience and you'll want to look elsewhere. For me it's a very good set with a real heart, held back just slightly by the repetition and those absent minifigures.

The parts story

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

The build splits into two clear halves. First you construct the base, which cleverly becomes a lidded storage box with three internal sections, and the trunk anchors down into that lid so the whole tree is nice and sturdy. Then you move up into the canopy, which is assembled as three separate branch sections you decorate with leaf plates and small flower elements before joining them. That upper stretch is where the pacing sags, because it's a lot of the same repeated motion, clipping leaves and blooms on over and over. It's relaxing if you're in the right mood and a bit of a slog if you're not.

Piece-wise this is a small-parts set rather than a big-molds set. The stars are functional: 16 brick-built hanger pieces (the orange and black 2x2 plate holders) that grip your photos and paper keepsakes, plus a small zoo of charming accessories, two bird figures, a butterfly, several little birdhouses in different colors, mushrooms, pumpkins, binoculars, a magnifying glass, roller skates, food bits, and a kite and toy plane snagged in the branches. The dozens of spare flowers tucked in the base give you real recoloring options. Just know that 1,040 pieces here means lots of tiny leaves and petals, so the part-count value looks better on paper than it feels in the hand.

Fun facts

01The design started life as a fan entry in the 2022 LEGO Ideas x Target 'What does family mean to you?' challenge, where it won the community fan vote.
02Fan designer Ivan Guerrero (aka Bulldoozer) is Filipino and also created LEGO Ideas 21324 123 Sesame Street, and he tucked a Filipino butterfly into this set as a personal nod.
03The base isn't just a stand: it opens into a hidden three-section storage compartment stocked with dozens of spare flowers and accessories so you can re-dress the tree by season.
04Despite every little accessory being built to minifigure scale, LEGO chose to include zero minifigures, which became the review community's single most common complaint.