DUPLO Mysteries of The White House

Explore the world-famous White House and uncover its hidden mysteries!

Five friends and their dog take a "strictly unguided" tour through The White House (entirely built with DUPLO bricks) and discover the building's amazing mysteries on 3 levels, featuring 10 famous rooms and locations! Investigate the Oval Office and figure out what's being hidden under the "Resolute Desk". How can you enter the Situation Room without knowing the top secret door code? Maybe your smart dog can sniff out a secret switch! What does the old attic above the North Portico have in store - and how do you get there in the first place? Finally LEGO's youngest fans and their parents get a DUPLO Ideas project to root for.

The set features 10 famous rooms and locations of the real White House with lots of authentic details:

- North Entrance Portico with its characteristic columns and the big hanging lantern
- Oval Office (office of the President) featuring the well-known oval shape, the "Resolute Desk" and the "Oval Office Grandfather Clock"
- The President's Bedroom
- The President's Bathroom
- Situation Room with a computer and lots of other interesting devices
- Blue Room (used for receptions) with distinct coloration, fireplace, marble-top table and 19th-century French chandelier
- Truman Balcony at the South Portico
- The Attic above the North Entrance Portico
- Grand Staircase & Cross Hall covered in a red carpet
- Entrance Hall with checkered floor tiles

Secret play features across the building's 3 levels:

- Secret stash underneath the "Resolute Desk"
- Hidden switch for opening the Situation Room door
- Disguised entrance door to the attic
- Detachable attic roof
- Convertible attic winch - just remove the lantern und attach the basket to the hook to pull up objects
- Secret door to the White House's roof with a superb view
- Big hidden stash below the North Portico stairs

The set's concept:

Using a 24x24 base plate as the set's foundation, my goal was to maximize fun and playability (on every available square inch) with a lot of explorable content for children as the "main users" while embedding everything in a unique (educational) "background story" located in a well-known real-life location with a certain level of authenticity at the same time, to serve the participating "secondary users" (parents) with a higher degree of thematic involvement than regular DUPLO sets usually provide. Or to cut the matter short: "DUPLO Mysteries of The White House" is meant to be a lot of fun for both children and their parents. Younger kids who are not yet able to really "discover" and use all the set's secret features can just play with it as a doll house - and when they come back to playing with it some months (or years) later, taking a more "sophisticated approach", they will see the qualities of the set with different eyes and can explore it again, now to unfold its full play potential.

My motivation:

Among the thousands of LEGO Ideas submissions there are only a handful of DUPLO projects (according to the search function). "Shouldn't LEGO's youngest (and most important) fans get a little bit more Ideas attention?!" This question marked the starting point for getting my latest DUPLO MOC project ready for a submission on LEGO Ideas. Being big LEGO fans for decades, we had bought many DUPLO sets for our little daughter and had great fun for hundreds of hours of building and playing. Then some day I realized that I had eventually become what you could call an "AFOD" ("Adult Fan of DUPLO"). I started building DUPLO MOCs using the masses of DUPLO bricks we already had at home. A lot of additional sets and bricks were bought for this purpose as well. Recently I searched for LEGO Ideas projects which use DUPLO bricks and that are designed for kids from 2-5 years - to my surprise such projects are more or less non-existent. So I became convinced that my latest idea for a new DUPLO MOC set might have some potential and could be interesting for other parents and their children, too.

It would be a dream come true for me (and my family) to see "DUPLO Mysteries of The White House" getting attention and being supported by the LEGO community!

I hope you like my project and decide to support it with your vote. Thank you very much and feel free to leave a comment! Since I am already working on my next DUPLO Ideas projects, you are also very welcome to follow my account, so you can be sure not to miss anything coming very soon.