Old Town Belfry

Does this mini modular seem at all familiar?  Like it recently hatched from an Old Town Belfry egg?  Well, against the grain of known LEGO modular history, this mini modular actually predates the full-sized modular.  The greatest brick-built inspiration for the Old Town Belfry LEGO Ideas submission is in fact a mini modular design I created for LEGO's "Mini Modular" Rebrick contest about 3 years ago. 

Scaling up this mini modular into a full-blown modular was a goal of mine ever since this contest closed.  Due to other ongoing projects, it took about a year to finally make the giant leap to full-blown old town glory.  After several weeks of grinding out the build, the design was complete!   ::enter gut-wrenching music::  If only I had rendered the design.  If only I had built it with real bricks.  If only I had posted it on social media. And most importantly, if only I had backed up the files to an external hard drive.  A few months ago, my computer crashed, and everything was lost.  All that remained was a fast-fading vision, and a flickr page with my mini modular photos.

However, in times of lost creative output, I tend to hunker down and push myself to not only recover what was lost, but to improve upon it.  Enter the Old Town Belfry.  I went into overdrive designing a new product with ever more beautiful details and features, storylines and characters, and I even added extra height to perfect the proportions and to deliver a grander presence.  All of these improvements came at a cost - in order to comply with the 3,000 maximum part count requirement of LEGO Ideas submissions, I had to discard several features from the mini modular I had hoped to include - a sculptured clock at street level, a small fountain at the rear courtyard, and a gate below the tower.  In lieu of these, I focused on interior details and added part-count-friendly features such as a well in the courtyard, an astronomical clock element, and wall-mounted lamps.  If this design were to enter the development phase, I would work with the LEGO team to reintroduce some of these "lost" elements, pun intended. 

Hope you enjoyed this bit of Old Town Belfry history!  Don't forget to share with your friends.

-Kurt