LEGO kicked things off with a bang this year, starting with the Stranger Things Creel House, a set that few could have seen coming. With Netflix looking to keep a lot of its Season 5 details under wraps, the Stranger Things LEGO set needed to be a closely guarded secret, but once episodes started rolling out, the first details were revealed and earlier this month it was released.
While LEGO has a lot of incredible sets planned for 2026, from the elaborate Pokemon set featuring Charizard, Venusaur, and Blastoise to the smaller-scale Zelda diorama, the Creel House has set a pretty high bar for the rest of the year. I like Stranger Things well enough, but this LEGO set really impressed me.
At a glance, the LEGO Stranger Things Creel House seems pretty unassuming. It looks like an old, decrepit house, and that’s basically what it is. There’s a ton of fun details in the facade of the house, from the way the LEGO pieces create scaffolding and different levels, and I think the solid brown pieces acting as boards are a nice touch. It’s a pretty solid haunted house if you are just looking for that.
Turn the Creel House around, and you can see all the bits of storytelling that are scattered throughout the rooms, like Henry Creel’s hat resting on the bed. Any of the LEGO houses usually have a fair bit of detail within the individual rooms, and the larger the building, the more opportunities there are to pack unique pieces in.
I’d argue that the backside of the Creel House LEGO set is the weaker one, even if the front doesn’t have as much “pop.” There were plenty of opportunities to pack even more Stranger Things references in, and I get not wanting to break the narrative setup that this is the Creel House, but it would have been fun to see some more general ST references as well.
That being said, I understand why some things are a little bit limited, because this is no ordinary LEGO house. If you’ve seen the LEGO Stranger Things house already, then you know what I’m talking about, but this build has an incredible gimmick where if you pull the sides (using the trees), it breaks apart in some really cool ways and reveals a sinister interior. It's such a cool flourish!
Once you start working on the LEGO Creel House build, it doesn’t take long before you start to see some of the “seams.” You begin to understand where it is going to break apart and go back together, but once I put in that first sliding mechanism, I fell in love. Then, as more and more segments of the house started to come together, I couldn’t help from pulling apart the build over and over again.
To be honest, this didn’t even need to be a Stranger Things-themed build, and it still would have been one of my favorites. I love that you pull apart the house to reveal that iconic clock from the show, and there is a lot for fans to be excited about, but it really is that gimmick that sold it for me.
Oftentimes, the elaborate (or even semi-elaborate) building LEGO sets do a great job of packing detail on the floors and rooms, but a lot of that is lost once you complete the facade. The Avengers Tower, for example, has some great themed floors that you can’t see without sliding part of the building off (which you can do by the way, but where do you put it?). The LEGO Stranger Things Creel House gives you a creative way to show off the inside that is relevant to the world of the Netflix show. And for a little added personality, some of those details change when you pull it apart, like the wallpaper shifting to a view of the Upside Down.
I know that a lot of my praise of the LEGO Stranger Things Creel House comes down to the shifting mechanism, but I do want to call out that the set comes with 13 minifigs that are all fantastic representations of everyone’s favorite characters. While there is no Hopper or Joyce Byers love, the kids are all here and the young adults as well, including Steve’s immaculate hairdo. And you get a Vecna and a Henry Creel minifig as well.
You also get a brick-built LEGO version of Steve’s maroon BMW from the show and a brick-built Squawk van. Admittedly, the two vehicles are just kind of there and don’t necessarily mesh with the rest of the build, but they could make for some fun MOCs.
With 19 bags for the house and 3 additional bags for the vehicles, the LEGO Stranger Things Creel House was a well-paced build that had me eager to see what the next detail was. There were some bags where you were only building the foundation, but once I started to pop pieces together and see the different “cracks,” I couldn’t stop. I know it’s so early, but this is one of my favorite LEGO builds I’ve done in a long time, and it’s a perfect pick-up for fans of Stranger Things. However, even if you’re not that big a fan, but you love cool LEGO gimmicks, this is still a well-done set.