The LEGO Modular Buildings Collection enters a new era with 11371 Shopping Street, but is it a generational leap we’ll look back on as fondly as we do with 10243 Parisian Restaurant?
Following 10350 Tudor Corner (Brick Fanatics’ number one set of 2025) was never going to be easy, but rather than skewering any one of the most-requested additions to the Modular Buildings Collection – a hospital, a school, a post office – 11371 Shopping Street plays it safe with another couple of stores, and instead puts its focus squarely on the design and aesthetics. And in doing so it effectively makes a great leap forward for modular buildings – for better and worse…
11371 Shopping Street
Release: Jan 1, 2026
Retiring: Dec 31, 2028
Price: £229.99 / $249.99 / €249.99
Pieces: 3,456
Minifigures: 7
Some 21 sets in at this point, the pressure and expectation that every new entry in the Modular Buildings Collection must live up to among the community is – in a word – immense. Occasionally a building comes along that sweeps aside those expectations, absorbs the pressure and delivers on every front, as was the case with 2025’s 10350 Tudor Corner. And then there’s 11371 Shopping Street, which in many ways embraces everything we’ve come to know and love about modular buildings, and in others feels detached from the rest of the series.
Time and again we’ve seen the LEGO design team playing around with geometry in these sets, most memorably in 10297 Boutique Hotel but even within sets that otherwise appear more straightforward (hello again 10350 Tudor Corner). 11371 Shopping Street takes that to the next level by conjuring up an incredibly unusual footprint for its two stores – one selling musical instruments, another chairs – even if it’s at the expense of interior space, and indeed full use of its standard 32x32 baseplate.
The result is an unconventional building experience, or as unconventional as you can get for what’s otherwise one of the most nostalgic subthemes around right now – there are still plenty of moments of stacking bricks that will take you back to your childhood, and that’s arguably one of the strengths of the modular buildings. But in this particular case the designers have leaned into triangles (as a concept) and rounded plates (as a LEGO piece) to achieve an atypical footprint, and it makes for a similarly atypical build.
For the first few bags, anyway. Once you realise how the designers have figured out this approach – taking advantage of those rounded plates and tiles to allow walls to meet at angles other than 90 degrees – the novelty wears off pretty quickly. It happens soon enough, in fact, for you to spend a good chunk of the build wondering if the trade-off for the lack of interior space in both buildings, and the ‘wasted’ space on the baseplate, is worth it.
There are aesthetic benefits, though. The alleyway created between the buildings is a neat throwback to 10246 Detective’s Office, even if peering down it has you wishing the rear space was fully-fleshed out (there’s a lot of exposed green baseplate and it’s pretty jarring). And the courtyard space out front, with the doors to the two stores situated at opposing 45-degree angles from the pavement, is a really nice space that breaks up a wider modular street in much the same way as 10255 Assembly Square did in 2017.
Those artistic touches extend beyond the structural and into every nook and cranny of 11371 Shopping Street. Designer Hoang Huy Dang explained that once he locked in the geometry, the rest of the model’s development focused on the aesthetics, and it very much shows from top to bottom. There are details worked in to every inch of both buildings’ façades that together make this set feel like the first in a new generation of modular buildings. In some ways, it’s giving shades of the same leap we saw from 2013’s 10232 Palace Cinema to 2014’s 10243 Parisian Restaurant.
But – ironically – that’s also where the cracks start to appear in 11371 Shopping Street. Presented alone, it’s a feast for the eyes that makes intelligent and incredible use of the current parts palette, so no matter where you look there’s something to appreciate and take in: the tulips outside the furniture store; the pigeon coop on its rooftop; the F1 Collectible Race Car halo elements repurposed for roof detailing on the music store; the flowerbeds across every windowsill; the pops of colour in the courtyard floor; and even the street-facing walls, thanks to how many tiny pieces are used to assemble them. But place it next to the other buildings, as it’s obviously designed for, and it feels almost too detailed; too busy.
If future LEGO modular buildings can continue in the same aesthetic and artistic direction, there’s every chance that Shopping Street will feel stronger in hindsight. But there are a couple of choices that it’s going to be trickier to salvage with more sets, and top of the list is the colour scheme. Just as the details that litter every inch collectively create a busy and overly fussy vibe in some ways, so too do the number of colours in play here detract from the overall impression, especially when butted up against other buildings.
That’s perhaps partly because the two previous modular buildings – 10350 Tudor Corner and 10326 Natural History Museum – have such clearly defined colour blocking, so even when there are a bunch of different colours working together (as in Tudor Corner’s almost Neapolitan-like three floors), your eye instantly accepts and recognises them. In 11371 Shopping Street, everything gets a little lost. And there’s some irony that its overload of mostly neutral colours – white is somehow the shade that really pops – feels just as muddled and confusing as jamming in a bunch of bright colours. The parallels to 31036 Toy & Grocery Shop’s colour scheme have been made many times over by now and they are unfortunately not off the mark.
10243 Parisian Restaurant’s aforementioned generational leap happened not only outside but inside, too, ramping up the level of interior detail above and beyond previous modular buildings. 11371 Shopping Street doesn’t match those grand aspirations when you peer inside each of its floors, but instead continues them much as you’d expect.
There are two major focuses: one, the variety of sub-assemblies for each of the musical instruments and chairs populating the stores; and two, the brick-built staircase that leads up through the music shop. The mini models provide nice breaks in the wider building experience, while the stairs are interesting if not exactly riveting to put together.
If you’re the type to care about the in-universe logic of these sets, though, you’ll be frustrated by the absence of any stairs in the furniture store. Instead, the carpenter must enter the music store, head up the stairs to the first floor and walk across the partition above the alleyway to access his workshop. That’s one area in particular where the reduced footprint of these buildings is sorely felt; there just isn’t room for any stairs in the smaller of the two structures.
The carpenter is one of seven minifigures in 11371 Shopping Street, and they’re by and large what you’d expect from the nature of the set. The twins and their purple uniforms aside, they mostly blend into the scene rather than pull focus, which is as always by design with the modular buildings. They accentuate and bring life to the scene, but once you assimilate this set into a wider street it doesn’t really matter which particular minifigures populate the pavement.
When I finished building 11371 Shopping Street, I had two first impressions: one, it was better than it looked in official product imagery; and two, there was something amiss that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. In writing out this review I realised what it was, and it might surprise you to learn that at the heart of it is the seemingly innocuous cat statue sitting in the courtyard.
The statue itself is another callback to 10255 Assembly Square, which features a fountain in its own courtyard. The difference is that it’s much smaller here – so small, in fact, that it feels less like a statue and more like a piece of home décor some careless minifigure has left lying in the street. The result is a warped sense of scale, and for me that underscores the wider problem with this modular building: it’s just trying to do too much within the standard 32x32 baseplate.
Novel geometry is not necessarily what I’m coming to these sets for, especially when the means of achieving it grows so stale so quickly, but I could live with it if it didn’t mean so many other compromises followed. Here it’s the diminutive footprint of the buildings, the lack of interior space, and even the overall composition of the entire model, where everything feels a little too squeezed in, a little too busy. The aesthetic choices and details are fun to build and interesting to explore in isolation, but cumulatively with the wide colour palette only drown each other out.
And none of that screams ‘here is a modular building worth an extra £30 / $20 / €20 over 10350 Tudor Corner’. There are more pieces in 11371 Shopping Street, but you’re not necessarily getting more of a building – the angles for the walls require so many tiny pieces that at times it’s a bit fiddlier than you’d expect from one of these sets, and compounds the notion that there’s not really any added value here. It’s a nominal bump over previous buildings and feels inflationary more than anything else, but don’t let that piece count fool you into thinking there’s more here than there really is. Just saying.
11371 Shopping Street is an unusual beast. We might be looking back at this set in five years’ time and praising it for launching us into a new era of modular buildings much like 10243 Parisian Restaurant did in 2014. Everything that sets it apart from its predecessors might be accentuated and amplified by its inevitable successors in 2027, 2028 and beyond. Or it might stick out like a sore thumb. On its own, it’s difficult to judge – but it’s certainly got enough going for it that it’s not one to completely dismiss.
Our honest opinion: An atypical addition to the Modular Buildings Collection, 11371 Shopping Street plays with our expectations for these sets in ways welcome and not. There are things to enjoy throughout, but right now it feels like too heavy a departure from its most recent predecessors.
This LEGO set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.
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How long does it take to build 11371 Shopping Street?
You’ll get a good six or seven hours out of 11371 Shopping Street, across 3,456 pieces and 24 numbered bags (oh hey, it’s another LEGO advent calendar in disguise).
How big is 11371 Shopping Street?
11371 Shopping Street stands 36.5cm tall (to the tip of its rooftop spire), 25cm wide and 25cm deep (those latter two dimensions being dictated by the set’s standard 32x32 baseplate).
How much does 11371 Shopping Street cost?
11371 Shopping Street represents a price increase from previous modular buildings at £229.99 in the UK, $249.99 in the US and €249.99 in Europe. You get more pieces for that price, but the finished model isn’t necessarily any bigger.
Which modular buildings does 11371 Shopping Street look best with?
11371 Shopping Street sits best next to 10243 Parisian Restaurant, 10350 Tudor Corner and 10255 Assembly Square (in our opinion), but will hopefully look better next to whatever comes next from the Modular Buildings Collection. You can see it next to almost every previous set here.
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