Friends

Heartlake City Apartments and Stores

A modular-style city block for Friends fans, at a friendlier price.

Set 42670 · 2025

Pieces2,040

Minifigs7

Year2025

Set number42670

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The verdict

If your mate loves the modular buildings but winces at the price tags, this is the sneaky-good alternative.

You get a proper multi-storey street scene, working washing machines, a pottery wheel, and enough characters to run a dozen storylines, all for well under what a modular costs. It leans playful over display-perfect, but it looks the part next to the grown-up modulars. Grab it if they want a big, fun, colourful build without dropping modular money.

Best for: Friends fans who want a modular-scale city block without the modular price

The full review

What it is

So your mate has been eyeing up the modular buildings but keeps flinching at the price, right? This is the LEGO® set to point them toward. Heartlake City Apartments and Stores packs 2,040 pieces into a proper city block: three colourful apartment houses stacked above a bakery, a ceramics studio, and a laundromat, plus a little corner park with a fountain, sunflowers, and a cat that has gotten itself stuck up a tree. It is unmistakably Friends in its colours and cheer, but the footprint and the split-section design (two chunks joined by Technic pins) borrow straight from the modular playbook. The whole thing measures roughly 16 by 40 modules, so it has real presence on a shelf.

The catch

Now the honest bits. First, the floors are attached to each other, which means getting your fingers into the ground-floor rooms to play or rearrange is genuinely awkward. The modulars famously lift apart floor by floor, and this one does not, so it is more display-and-admire than deep-dive playset down low. Second, there are a lot of stickers. If your friend is the type who breaks into a cold sweat over decals, warn them now. And third, it is only 16 studs deep, noticeably shallower than a true modular, so if they plan to line it up next to the Corner Garage the difference shows from the side (from the front, though, it blends in surprisingly well). At $169.99 it is not pocket change either, even if it is a bargain by modular standards.

Who it's for

Here is who should grab it. Kids and family builders who want a big, bright, story-driven street will get an absolute ton out of this, because the play features are the real star: washing machines that actually spin, a pottery wheel that turns, a rooftop terrace for harvesting honey, and a lemonade stand run by Paisley, Zac, and Ella. Adult Friends collectors and modular fans on a budget should also take a serious look, since it slots into a city display without breaking the bank. Who should skip it? Purist modular collectors who want floors that lift cleanly apart, and anyone allergic to stickers. For everyone else, this is one of the best-value big builds Friends has done, and an easy recommendation.

The parts story

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

The build breaks into digestible chunks, which is part of why it works so well as a shared project or a relaxed weekend job (reckon on 5-6 hours solo). You build the two sections separately and clip them together with Technic pins on the sides, the same trick the Heartlake City Community Center and Main Street Building use, so they all snap into one continuous block. Each floor stacks up as its own little vignette: bakery and pottery studio and laundromat down low, apartments above, and a rooftop terrace up top. The Technic play mechanisms are the fun surprise, because one simple gear setup drives both the spinning washing machine drums and the turning pottery disc, so you get a satisfying little functional moment mid-build rather than just wall after wall.

For the parts nerds there is real stuff here. The headline is a brand-new window mould, the Window 1 x 3 x 2, which shows up five times in white with trans-clear glass and is exactly the kind of part that ends up in everyone's MOC drawer. Pom the chubby cat arrives as a fresh recolour in tan, and there are recoloured leaf elements dotted through the little park. LEGO also did something genuinely new here: this is the first set where every sticker is numbered in the exact order you apply it during the build, which is a small mercy given how many there are. On value, the part-out figure sits around $278 against a $169.99 retail price, so the piece-count-per-dollar math lands firmly in your favour.

Fun facts

01Fatimah is the first-ever firefighter minidoll in the LEGO Friends theme, added here mainly to rescue a cat stuck up a tree in the corner park.
02It is the first LEGO set where every single sticker is numbered in the precise order you apply it during the build.
03The two building sections clip together with Technic pins that match the Heartlake City Community Center and Main Street Building, letting you chain them into a modular-style city block.
04A single Technic gear mechanism powers both the spinning washing machine drums in the laundromat and the turning disc in the pottery studio.