Gabby's Dollhouse

Eight pastel rooms, four cat-loving characters, and a build a four-year-old can actually finish.

Brick Rated Score

4.0/5

Set 10788 · 2023

Pieces499

Minifigs4

Year2023

Set number10788

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The verdict

This one won me over faster than I expected, and I'm not even the target audience.

It is a genuinely charming eight-room house that pulls the show straight off the screen, and the printed pieces do a lot of heavy lifting. The lift is fiddly and the play features are thin once it's built, so go in knowing it's more display-and-pretend than mechanical wizardry. For a young fan of the show, though, it lands.

Best for: Young Gabby's Dollhouse fans (4 and up) building their first big set

The full review

What it is

I'll be honest, I sat down with this one expecting a flimsy licensed cash-in and instead found myself grinning at the little saxophone. Gabby's Dollhouse is an eight-room pastel house that recreates the show almost beat for beat: a kitchen to bake in, an art room, a music room with a piano, a bathroom for pampering, a bedroom for naps, a playroom with a slide, and a rooftop with a spinning dance floor. A sliding elevator runs up the middle to tie it all together. The accessory count is where it got me, there's a banana, a cupcake, a paintbrush and palette, a microphone, a guitar, a saxophone, a hairbrush, and a pile of other tiny props that give every room something to actually do. It feels less like a static build and more like a stage set waiting for a story.

The catch

Now for the parts that will test your patience. The lift is the weak link that almost everyone flags. It works, but it's wobbly, and if you don't add a couple of bricks to lock the top it can pull itself apart mid-play. The cat-like ears on the roof are the other repeat offender, they keep popping loose, and plenty of parents ended up reinforcing them. And once the house is standing, the actual play features are thin: a slide, a spinning floor, a lift, and that's mostly it. It looks busy but doesn't do a huge amount, which is true of real dollhouses too, but at 79.99 dollars it's fair to want a bit more, especially since you're paying for four characters you may already own from smaller sets.

Who it's for

So who should get it? A young fan of the show, full stop. The build is split into nine short booklets, one per section, and that makes it a set a four or five year old can genuinely finish with a little help, which is a real confidence win at this age. If you love clever engineering or you're chasing a set that keeps grown-up hands busy, this is not your build, and you'll find the repetition and the wobbly lift more frustrating than fun. But if there's a Gabby obsessive in your life, the recognition on their face when the house comes together is exactly what this set is selling, and it delivers it.

The parts story

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

Building it is gentle by design. Six of the room bases share the same 8x16 footprint, so once you've done one you know the rhythm, and the nine little booklets mean a kid can knock out a room, take a break, and come back without losing the thread. It's repetitive for an adult, but that repetition is the point here: it's teaching a young builder how a big set comes together in manageable chunks. The color palette alone is worth mentioning, this is a wall of mint, pink, lavender, and coral that will brighten up any shelf it lands on.

The printed elements are where the value hides. Loads of the plates and wall panels come pre-printed with the show's details rather than relying on stickers, which keeps the whole thing looking sharp. Cakey is a completely new mold, made to match that odd little cupcake-cat shape, and Pandy Paws and MerCat use modified micro-doll bodies with custom tails and heads. Gabby herself gets a new hair piece. There's even a newly introduced gear block in the lift tower, though LEGO chose not to fully gear the mechanism because a tall stack of worm gears would have overcomplicated the build for kids. For roughly 16 cents a piece it's not a bargain by part count, but the printed parts and the character molds are what you're really paying for.

Fun facts

01Cakey is a brand-new LEGO mold created specifically for this set, because no existing part matched that cupcake-cat shape.
02The set is built as nine separate instruction booklets, one per room section, so several kids can build different rooms at the same time.
03The lift tower quietly introduced a new gear block that could combine with worm gears, but LEGO left the elevator hand-operated to keep the build simple for young fans.
04With an original RRP of 79.99 dollars and a projected retirement in 2026, it's one of the larger sets the Gabby's Dollhouse theme has produced.