Maritime Museum

As Minotaur Bay grew, it also gained a Museum. The building was from a set, but I swapped out the clock for a ship's wheel to give it a maritime touch appropriate for a seaside town.

The Horse's Head

The next building I made for Minotaur Bay was a pub, The Horse's Head. I wanted an old-style look for the architecture, so took a lot of the pieces from one of my favourite Castle sets, the Medieval Market Village. The horse-head sign from over the blacksmith makes a great painted pub sign.

Cafe

With plans for a three-baseplate-wide display, I needed a couple more buildings to line the street. I worked on a basic footprint of 8 x 16, which allows for easy rearranging of buildings alongside baseplates.

Below is a cafe, built on an upper storey above another business, a transport company. The side panels from the Cargo Truck were easily modified into building walls.

Pizzeria

To fit in the Seafood Restaurant, my beach setup grew to two baseplates wide, which then meant more buildings to fill in the street.

The first addition was the Pizzeria, modded from its official form as part of the Town Square. I removed the outdoor seating area and moved it onto a 16 x 32 baseplate. I put a jumper plate behind the "City Pizza" sign so that it could be set at an angle, and then added construction workers to that it looked like the sign was still being fixed into place. The worker on the right is hanging the menu on the wall.

Brick Separator

Here's a little building I made as an experiment. The angled pillars holding up the roof might be familiar to many LEGO builders.

The Brick Separator is a very handy tool. I was recently over at my parents' house sorting and building some of my childhood sets. The number of teeth marks on the edges of small pieces joined together (from years and years of separating tightly-joined plates the hard way) was kind of scary. I wish we'd had a tool like this back then! While there were earlier versions in the 1990s, this tool dates from 2012, and is provided in a lot of large sets.

Seafood Restaurant

After the apartment building, I kept going with the blue and white colour scheme and built another beachside building - a seafood restaurant.

It was partly inspired by some fish and chip shops near the Gold Coast that combined a takeaway service with a sit-down restaurant.

Apartments - Interior

After I built my seaside apartments, I furnished them and gave them occupants.

The ground floor has a reception counter, a TV on the wall (I think the wall panel is from a police station set), a rug and a sofa. The sofa is made from just four elements - a 2x6 brick, a 1x4 brick, and 2 hinge bricks. As the ground floor, the only windows are on the front wall.

Seaside Apartments

After I built my beach, I wanted to build a luxury apartment building like you would see on the Gold Coast. Here's the finished product:

Chinese Restaurant

When it comes to the Ninjago theme, I'm not a fan of the vehicle sets. The buildings are a different story, and I recently built 70728 Battle for Ninjago City. I love the colour combinations of red, gold and dark green.

I have a couple still in the box, with future plans for a large medieval Japanese display. With no room to display it on my shelves, I dismantled the set I'd just built, and then set to work on making a Chinese restaurant instead.

After a lot of trial and error, and some building and re-building, I ended up with the building below.