LEGO 10280 Flower Bouquet Review

Part of the new Botanical Collection, LEGO Flower Bouquet released on the 1st January. A literal bunch of flowers, the set is designed to be displayed instead of the real thing. And it might just be one of LEGO’s most innovative sets yet.

What’s in the box?

Inside the box are five numbered bags: two numbered ‘one’, two numbered ‘two’, and one numbered ‘three’. Each bag will have you building a couple of different types of flower. There’s also an instruction booklet and an extra unnumbered bag containing leaves and ‘stems’ (essentially very long Technic rods).

The instruction booklet itself is quite nice. It’s fairly thin and doesn’t have the luxury of a thicker cover like some bigger sets have, but it’s filled with useful information. It includes details on each of the flowers to give you a bit of botanical knowledge, as well as a word from the designers. It’s a nice touch, and something we’re seeing more often in these adult-focused sets.

The build

As you’d expect, there are quite a few fiddly bits in building LEGO 10280 Flower Bouquet. Overall, though, it’s quite an enjoyable build.

There’s a bit of repetition since there are a few duplicate flowers. It’s up to you if you want to tackle them one-by-one or save time and build them altogether. Even on the same flower, though, you’ll find yourself needing to repeat small sections. The lavender, for example, needs 50-odd tiny purple flowers attaching to stems. It can get a little tedious, but this is the most repetitive and fiddly part. All the other flowers have slightly bigger parts than this.

A few pieces require you to be extra careful with them too; we had a few instances of sections coming apart as we tried to attach new pieces, so you’ll need a gentle touch. It makes sense though; flowers are fragile in real life, after all!

There are a lot of neat building techniques used to bring LEGO Flower Bouquet to life, and it’s really nice seeing the flowers come together. Starting with a ‘bud’ that doesn’t look like much of anything, you’ll end up with a truly intricate, wonderfully created flower.

Play or display?

We’re confident in saying that LEGO Flower Bouquet is one of the most ‘adult’ sets ever released, and that’s one of the reasons we love it so much. It’s not a set a kid is going to want to play with; this is purely a display piece. And what a display piece it is. On showing a picture to a friend, they exclaimed “I thought they were real from a glance! I had to zoom in”. And from a distance, you really could be forgiven for thinking that you’re looking at a beautifully colourful real bouquet of flowers. It’s a real testament to LEGO’s designers for creating such wonderful shapes with (mostly) pre-existing bricks.

The (slight) downside to LEGO Flower Bouquet as a display set is that it’s not quite display-ready straight out of the box, which is slightly unusual for a LEGO set. You’ll need to supply your own vase or jug to display them in. Or, you could get creative and create your own vase out of LEGO. We’ve used a basic glass vase, and added a few old blue bricks in the bottom to create the illusion of water. It’s a nice, quirky touch.

The Flower Bouquet has now taken pride of place on the window sill at the top of the stairs, and they look fantastic there. They’re bright, beautiful and happy – and exactly the sort of thing that can bring a bit of joy to a previously dull corner of a house. Plus, unlike real flowers you don’t have to worry about them wilting at any point. Though you do have to be a little careful not to knock them; some of them are rather fragile.

Value for money?

We’ve absolutely no doubt that LEGO 10280: Flower Bouquet is worth every penny. At £44.99, it doesn’t stretch into LEGO’s most expensive sets, but it’s not quite pocket-money priced either. But for what you get, it’s excellent value, both in terms of cost-per-piece and for the finished product. It truly is one of LEGO’s most unique sets to date, and something you can have on display in any home, without it looking like a ‘toy’.

The only thing to take into consideration is that you’ll need to also purchase a vase or jug to display the flowers in, which raises the cost a little. But our glass vase cost just £5, so it shouldn’t break the bank.

We had a blast building the Flower Bouquet, and now we get joy out of seeing them on display every time we walk past. It’s an excellent set, and it’s made us very excited to see what other unique ‘adult’ sets LEGO has up its sleeve.