What would LEGO Icons 10332 Medieval Town Square look like if you could change the colour of one of the buildings?
Releasing in 2023 off the back of
There are some wonderful techniques across 10332 and a whole host of details and insights into medieval times that do successfully build more of a world around the other generally castle-centric LEGO Castle sets. But, it has remained in the shadow of the flagship Lion Knights’ Castle for obvious reasons and, as both approach retirement from shelves by the end of 2025, it’s the bigger, better 10305 that we recommend over and above Medieval Town Square.
That’s in part due to the incomparable quality and LEGO experience that Lion Knights’ Castle offers, but it’s also due to parts of the concept to 10332 just not coming together perhaps as best as they could have. Specifically, we’re talking about the design choice to offer five half-buildings in the set each broken into parts and then attached with hinges to each other for two larger buildings that fold together.
However, for how the buildings and their individual sections have been designed, they don’t quite come together visually or stylistically. They are pleasing on the eye and offer a variety of colour and techniques, as well as help to showcase several different aspects to medieval life. But the approach to connect two unrelated buildings together with hinges is unusual in this instance, as it tries to tie parts of the set together that thematically and visually only seem to work against each other.
Which leads us to our project – recolouring one of the buildings to see what difference it would make. We selected the large inn for this project, and specifically the top two floors, choosing to recolour it from the olive green and dark tan design to match the smaller red and black building it is attached to.
To do this we simply parted out the set on BrickLink, creating a wishlist with just the parts to the set; deleted all the parts from the list that were not olive green, dark tan or medium nougat; and then recoloured all the green parts to red, dark tan parts to black and medium nougat parts to tan, to fit the colours of those same parts on the other building we were using as reference. Whether or not you like the look of the finished product, we should say this was not a cheap exercise and set us back about £70 – given the set itself costs £199.99 this isn’t a project we’d say is worth it from a financial perspective.
Building the set with the recoloured parts did take a little getting used to, but the end result comes together very effectively, so that you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s not the original colour scheme for that side of the building.
Both opened or closed, the model comes together so much more neatly (in our opinion) now that it's all visually cohesive. This is a more plausible medieval building that looks a lot better on display, whilst the small observation tower to one side nicely balances the otherwise quite vibrant colour scheme splashed across the rest of the model. In many ways it better matches the slightly smaller 21325 Medieval Blacksmith too. We can understand and appreciate the creative decisions that went into making 10332 the way it is, but it’s fun to imagine what if…
As we say, for the price this is not something we could fairly recommend anyone do, but for anyone curious about whether a recolour could smarten up 10332 Medieval Town Square, here’s your answer.
Again, 10332 Medieval Town Square is an otherwise wonderful set and if you have the budget – and already have
This set was provided for review purposes by the LEGO Group.
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