Today I’m sharing my review of the LEGO Luna Lovegood’s House set (76467). The LEGO Group included this set in their Harry Potter 25th Anniversary Collection. The set appealed to me because of the quirky looking crooked house and a surprisingly fun play feature I’ll get to in a moment.

Keep off the dirigible plums!

The House

This set recreates Luna Lovegood’s house from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Although the architecture leans (literally!) more towards the movie depiction of the house, The LEGO Group included plenty of elements referenced in the book as well. For example, Luna had been kidnapped and was not present at the house when Harry and Hermione visited it. But it would not have made sense to have a LEGO model of Luna’s house without including a Luna minifigure. The house is decorated with her fun artwork, and even includes the painting of her friends hanging on her bedroom ceiling.

The house itself is fairly small, standing just over 11 inches tall and consisting of 764 pieces. The front side of the house is colorful and eccentric just as we would expect for Luna’s home. I love that the designers included a kite flying from the house like in the movie. The back side of the house consists of three very small interior rooms which were challenging to photograph.

Front view of the house.
Back view of the house. The red spiral staircase was a clever addition.
The room on the middle floor holds a printing press and the Erumpent horn.
Luna’s tiny bedroom and art studio are on the top floor.

The Minifigures

The set includes five minifigures, all with dual-sided heads and magic wands. Xenophilius Lovegood (Luna’s father) is the only minifigure exclusive to this set; he is nicely detailed and photographs well. Harry, Hermione, and Luna are all repurposed from the Malfoy Manor (76453) set, although Harry has a different (previously issued) head in this set. There is also an evil looking Death Eater, which appears to be the version from the Hagrid & Harry’s Privet Drive Escape (76459) set. Sadly, Ron Weasley was not included in the current set.

Luna (and her Hare Patronus), Harry, Hermione, Xenophilius Lovegood, and a Death Eater are included in the set.

The Tale of the Three Brothers

In the Deathly Hallows story, Hermione reads the Tale of the Three Brothers to Harry and Ron. The movie had a hauntingly beautiful animation sequence inspired by oriental shadow puppetry. In the LEGO set, the designers included a light brick projector which casts one of the three magical artifacts or the deathly hallows symbol on the kitchen wall.

Hermione reads the story from The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Turn the knob to rotate between the four image tiles, then press the square tile to activate the light brick. The printed windows are on a track beneath the floor.
Projected images of the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak of Invisibility.

Luna’s Hare Patronus

In addition to the minifigures, the set includes Luna’s Hare Patronus, one of at least four (including an awesome wolf in the Hogwarts Hospital Wing set!) that The LEGO Group has revealed.

Luna’s Hare Patronus

I thought it would be fun to explain how I created this image. As shown below, it is a composite of three photos – the base image and two images of the hare. I photographed the hare images by moving the hare back and forth in front of an LED light (to make it more transparent) during a series of one-half second exposures. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get a couple frames that looked like they would work. Everything else happened in Photoshop…

  • I aligned and merged the two hare images and then selected just the hare and blue trail and copied them to a new layer.
  • I extended the trail using the path blur tool and used the puppet warp tool to edit the shape of the trail.
  • I painted a few additional wispy lines in the trail.
  • I duplicated the hare/trail layer a couple times with different blend modes applied (screen and hard light) to make it more glowy.
  • I merged the edited hare/trail layer and base layer, made global lighting and contrast adjustments, and painted in more light and dark areas (dodge and burn).
  • Finally, I used a custom brush to add some sparkly stars to Luna’s wand and the hare/trail.

Here are the three initial images:

The three images I used to create the image of Luna casting her Hare Patronus.

The Death Eater

I appreciate that the LEGO Luna Lovegood’s House set is bright and colorful, which appropriately reflects Luna’s weird and creative personality. But the story of The Deathly Hallows is a dark one. So I decided to create an ominous Death Eater scene with color grading like the movie. This is what I came up with:

The Death Eater

The image was created using forced perspective. Chris Whitlow wrote a very detailed post about using forced perspective in toy photography if you want to learn more about the process.

The final image is a composite of three photos – one photo of Harry and Hermione with Luna’s house in the background, one photo with the Death Eater positioned close to the camera in front of Harry and Hermione, and one image with all of the minifigs removed (to make it easier to remove the support sticks from the image). 

The initial setup for The Death Eater image. The camera is about 5 feet from Luna’s house.

The post-processing in Photoshop was relatively straightforward. I masked out the support sticks holding the three minifigs and slightly repositioned the Death Eater minifig in the frame. Then I added the black smoke with a brush. Finally, I adjusted the lighting and contrast, added a motion effect, and color graded the final version.

Conclusion

I am grateful that I had the chance to photograph and review this set. There are definitely some decent opportunities to create photo scenes from the Deathly Hollows book and movie, as well as with Luna. The projector is fun. I am happy to have a Death Eater and Xenophilius in my collection; there is plenty of potential for future photos with them. And I do love the exterior of the house, which could be easily used for non-Harry Potter scenes. Is that enough to justify spending $89.99 USD on it? Maybe not, particularly because I still want to create a Deathly Hallows version of Ron and grab another Death Eater minifig or two.

Thank you to The LEGO Group and Toy Photographers for supplying the set and allowing me to check it out for you. If you end up getting this set, I’d love to see what photos you create with it!

What is it? Who are you? What do you want?