Stranger Things‘ main series may have taken its final bow for now, but the legacy of its five seasons will undoubtedly live on for a very long time. Of course, more shows are coming to the franchise, and it even has a Broadway play in the mix, one that gives you a front-row seat to all the adventure, action, and emotion the series has to offer. If you’re looking to actively relive the feeling of watching the original Stranger Things series, though, there’s nothing that comes closer to recapturing that experience than building The LEGO Group’s Stranger Things: The Creel House set. This transformational build, which highlights Stranger Things 5 but brings together elements from the entire series, will let you create the beloved world of Stranger Things brick by brick and hold its friendship, fear, and love in your very own hands.
To help us understand the true uniqueness of the Stranger Things: The Creel House LEGO set, we sat down with The LEGO Group’s Michael Psiaki, the Senior Master Model Designer on the build. Psiaki shared with us his favorite Easter eggs from the set, how Steve Harrington’s LEGO Minifigure hair came to life, and the overall storytelling intent behind this Stranger Things LEGO build. Enjoy our full interview below.
Nerdist: The characters of Stranger Things are such a huge reason why the series is so popular, and it’s awesome to see so many of them in the set. Can you talk about what it was like deciding what each Stranger Things LEGO Minifigure should look like and giving them the right accessories? Did any of them ever look wildly different from their original concepts?
Michael Psiaki: The LEGO minifigures were incredibly important to get right from a design perspective, because the characters depicted really are the heart of Stranger Things. Our design team started by aligning on absolute core looks for each character from season five; from there, we worked closely with Netflix’s provided reference materials to make sure things like hairstyles, colors, and accessories felt authentic. The goal was always that you could recognize each character at a glance, even in LEGO minifigure form, and then reward closer inspection with the details fans of the show know and love.
I need to talk about Dustin’s Hellfire Club shirt! Where did the idea to use a LEGO Minifigure head instead of a demon come from? It works so well.
Michael Psiaki: I have to give full credit to the inclusion of Dustin’s Hellfire Club t-shirt torso element to my teammate, Crisy Dyment! Its inclusion was one of those moments where LEGO design logic and fan knowledge really clicked. Instead of trying to replicate the t-shirt graphic from the show exactly, we leaned into a design that felt both playful and fun, in alignment with the LEGO brand, while remaining true to Dustin’s character. Replacing the demon head with a LEGO minifigure head let us keep the spirit of the original Hellfire Club logo while making it feel like something that plausibly exists in the LEGO universe.
Steve Harrington is also one of my favorites. And of course, his hair is so iconic. What was the process like to get his Stranger Things LEGO Minifigure locks to lay just right?
Michael Psiaki: Our design team has a vast library of hair elements that we can leverage. Thus, step one in developing a new LEGO minifigure for a character is always to run through that hair element library and see if there’s anything there that works. With Steve, we were fortunate that the perfect minifigure hair element already existed (Fun fact: it is a hair element we developed way back in summer of 2020!).
Vecna is such a unique and convoluted LEGO Minifigure to get right! Is he one of your most detailed Minifigures ever? The part for his hand is also so unique. How did you go about translating such a complex form into a Minifigure?
Michael Psiaki: Vecna was definitely one of the most challenging LEGO minifigures to design in this Stranger Things set; his design as a character in the show is incredibly complex, layered, and organic, presenting questions of what details we would include in LEGO minifigure form. We focused on capturing his overall silhouette, textures, and defining features in a way that would read clearly at minifigure scale. The element for hand was especially important—it’s such a signature part of Vecna’s design as a character, and creating a new element for that helped transform the character in a big way.
Speaking of complex forms, the transformational feature of the Creel House is just incredible. When you think about it, you get three versions of the house in one when you put together this Stranger Things LEGO build. How technically difficult was it to figure out how to get the house to transform like that, and how important was it to add that storytelling element into the set?
Michael Psiaki: The transformation feature of this set was, without question, the most difficult design step in the entire project for me! From the very beginning of the design process, the idea wasn’t just to make something technically impressive, but to use the function of the set to tell the story of the Creel House. A big part of making this work then was to make the functionality as hidden as possible — so that when you build the house initially, you almost can’t tell the added functionality is there!
I wanted builders to be able to experience the different states of the Creel House as they exist across the show—pristine, broken, and fully consumed by Vecna’s mind. Getting all of that to work mechanically with the transformational function, while still feeling intuitive and sturdy, took a lot of iteration.
I was so impressed with the way you get to see Vecna’s Mind Flayer through stickers when the Creel House LEGO set breaks open. What was your favorite Stranger Things Easter egg in the set?
Michael Psiaki: One of my favorite easter eggs in the set (I encourage readers to take a close look for themselves — I won’t share them all!) is a small cardboard box build that is hidden up in the attic. I don’t want to reveal too much of its significance — let’s just say it’s not the only LEGO Stranger Things set where this build has appeared!
There are so many new pieces and innovations in this set. What was your favorite new element to see come to life in this LEGO Stranger Things set?
Michael Psiaki: The stained glass window is a personal favorite new element in this set — although technically, it is a new decoration of an existing element. It’s such a striking visual piece and does a lot of atmospheric storytelling on its own. The graphic for that element was designed by teammate Crisy Dyment.
It’s always cool to get cars in a build, and in this set there are two. Are there any unique aspects to these vehicles that fans should be excited about?
Michael Psiaki: The vehicles were a fun addition to this set because they help ground the set in the 1980s universe of Stranger Things. We paid a lot of attention to silhouettes and small details in the two cars’ design, so that they would feel like authentic LEGO cars and recognizable vehicles from the show. Both of the cars are using a new rim element that was developed as an expansion to the LEGO System in Play, as well as a new 4×4 chassis component in Steve’s car. Also, similar to events in the show, you’re able to swap the car antenna between the two vehicles.
Did you get to watch the Stranger Things finale early in order to design this LEGO Creel House set? Are there any teases or hints you’ll only understand after seeing the full series?
Michael Psiaki: We had access to a lot of great series reference material from the Netflix team — on top of hundreds of production stills and set blueprints, we even got the chance to visit the actual Creel House where the series was filmed, where we met with the Duffer Brothers and got to show them our preliminary version of the LEGO model inside Henry Creel’s Bedroom. The set is designed with the full arc of the Stranger Things story in mind; there are definitely details that will resonate more strongly once you’ve experienced the series as a whole. It’s one of those builds where revisiting it after watching the show can help reveal new layers.
If you were already a fan of Stranger Things before designing the Creel House set, what aspect meant the most to you to bring to life?
Michael Psiaki: When it comes to Stranger Things, the idea that things aren’t always what they seem on the surface is a core theme to me. The importance of this theme guided our design of the set’s transformation feature as a unique LEGO building experience. Building something that looks safe and familiar, and then discovering what’s hidden underneath, felt like the perfect homage to this theme.
Stranger Things is now streaming in full on Netflix. The LEGO Stranger Things Creel House set is now available for purchase.
The post Explore the Secrets of LEGO’s STRANGER THINGS: THE CREEL HOUSE Set with Its Designer (Interview) appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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