advent calendar 2021

Gift of the Day: The Mount Everest of Lego Sets

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Retailer

Welcome to Curbed’s Advent-calendar gift guide. For each of the 25 days before Christmas, we will be doling out, one by one, the gifts recommended by dozens of design bigwigs with extremely good taste. So keep checking in daily for new drops.

“I’ve had Legos since I was a boy, and I continued the tradition with my three sons growing up,” says Christopher Peacock, founder of NYC’s Christopher Peacock Cabinetry. “We built a couple of Star Wars spaceships and also a train set, which was fantastic.” The longtime Lego enthusiast got back into the building blocks fairly recently as something to do during COVID lockdowns. “I found it therapeutic and a way to clear my mind,” Peacock says. These days, he typically tinkers with Legos in a room above his garage that’s filled with musical instruments, old toys, Scrabble, Monopoly, plus a “big table with jigsaw puzzles and Legos where projects have been known to sit unfinished for many months at a time.”

Peacock’s most recent Lego accomplishment was building this James Bond Aston Martin DB5 kit, “an iconic car” that involved “so much detail, and a surprising amount of working parts.” Tackling the Taj Mahal would be a far lengthier and more challenging process. “It would take me years to complete, knowing my attention span,” he says. “But I love the idea of finishing it.”

Gift of the Day: The Mount Everest of Lego Sets