Lego 10217 Diagon Alley - Ollivander's Wand Shop

Prologue

This is a set that my wife bought in Hong Kong during her holiday there with her friend. It was much cheaper than in Singapore costing around SGD215 but I have only taken the time to open it up recently as I was more excited by other modular and Pirates sets. Below is a cover art of the set.

The front cover is very beautifully done with each set having the same amount of attention. Harry Potter and gang are staring from the upper right corner with a very irritated/bored kind of look or as we affectionately call it the "sian 1/2 look".

This set consists of 3 desperate builds, which I have no idea what the names are, I just know one is like a evil wizards shop, another a bank and the last one like some wizards' equipment shop. Forgive me as I did not watch ANY of the movie or read the books. The back of the box shows as usual some of the play features and moveable parts of each set.

The other 4 sides as usual show various other smaller pictures of the set. I like the fact that even the bottom of the box has a picture on it. The top features all the nice minifigures one would get out of the set. For me though, as I am not a Harry Potter fan, does not make me want to have this set even more or anything, I am more interested in the sets itself but the fact that we get so many minifigures do not hurt the set one bit.

The bottom of the box has all the obligatory warnings about how it can be a choking hazard, yada yada

Now here is this part which I do not understand. It is pimping the video games but it is saying do not to aim at eyes or face...

The last side has the name of Diagon Alley in a few different languages and when you look at it, you realise that it seems the foreign language translation is very different for some reason.

The box is also using the tape and simple box flaps packaging meaning it is easy to open the box and also easy to store it flat as no glue was used on the flaps. This is one reason I do really like the exclusive sets, their packaging protect the items better and are easier to keep at the end of the day.
 

Contents - Ollivander's Wand Shop

Enough with the box, here is a shot of the manuals, sticker sheet and bags of the set. In total, the complete set has 16 bags of various sizes, with bags labelled 1 corresponding to the first build and so on.

The set comes with 3 manuals with the logical division of 1 manual per build. The manuals and sticker sheet are safely packed in a plastic bag with a cardboard backing. This has become more or less the default standard used in most of the exclusives from Lego today and is great as it protects the items much better than any other method Lego has used so far.

With that said, let us move on to the build itself.

The Build - Ollivander's Wand Shop

Okay I have done some Google research on the set and this first build is the
Ollivander's Wand Shop which Harry Potter goes to get his first wand.
This build features 3 minifigures and 6 animals. The map which seems unique to this set is held by Mr. Ollivander and the other 2 characters, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger both carrying wands. As for the animals, there are 3 very cool looking owls in all different shades, 1 uncommon bat and 1 common silver coloured fish.

The build beings slowly by building some accessories to the wand shop. It starts with some display boards, wizard hats stand, an owl/bat stand and 2 lamp posts that look very Victorian to me. They also made me think of the Elseworld novel of Batman called Gotham by Gaslight which was fantastic novel by the way, but is weird why my brain went that direction...

Anyways from the loose acessories, we go to the main build itself, the wand shop. At 25% build, it looks pretty sparse and it is quite an unsteady structure at this stage.

At the 50% level, it looks much better with the name of the shop being up and the nice pearl gold and black windows of the shop front giving it a very nice classy look.

At the left side is a poster featuring some unknown villain I guess.

The right side features the very nice combination of pear gold and dark red awning and the wall has this nice mix of reddish-brown, tan and dark tan bricks. Both side of the wall have this construction style that gives the nice bricks and mortar look.

At 75% completion, we can see the 2nd floor is up with some of the roof portions as well. The front façade features the curved windows arrangement. They are like bay windows and really is quite a nice feat of build with he 2nd floor one extending slightly over the ground floor one.

Looking from behind, we can see a sprinkling of potions bottles on the 2nd floor. I like the 2 distinct colour schemes. Black and reddish brown predominantly at the ground floor and the sand green with tan making up the 2nd floor.

Finally, the whole build is complete and the building simply looks great.

This side picture show the awning side which I do like due to the pearl gold with dark red combination awning. Pearl gold with black also seems to work very well together.

The colour combination is very well done I feel and the interior wizard accessories make the place look rather cramp and all the wood colours gives it a somewhat vintage feel.

The other side feels slight more plain with the wanted post but it still looks good nevertheless.

Final Thoughts - Ollivander's Wand Shop

This set was bought last year in Hong Kong and is one of the few sets that my wife bought that does not come from themes that I usually buy, namely modulars and star wars. Reason is that I really do like medieval looking building but I have been resisting for such a long time (looking at you Castle and Kingdoms). This was bought to just dabble into a bit of it. Some sets like LoTR disappointed me but generally buildings and boats do not for me. I think the reason that I was disappointed with LoTR was that these set actually need to have a much higher piece count to give some credit to the structures they are trying to represent but due to multiple consideration they come out looking rather skeletal.

I do love the colour combination and that possibly pulls me towards this build much more than the other ones though I have not started building them yet. Maybe my assessment will change after I am done building with them. I am taking some time to build as I am trying to savour it as much as I can. Look out for my 2 other reviews of this set these following weeks.