Right now, my dining table looks like a battlefield. Pelennor Fields, to be precise, because I’m somewhere in the middle of building the Lego Minas Tirith set – 8200-odd pieces of a citadel that seems determined to spread across every flat surface in my house. Grey bricks here, white bricks there, a small mountain of 1×1 plates that easily get lost in the rug. It is, genuinely, one of the best builds I’ve ever attempted. But it is also a little chaotic.
So when I stumbled across Brickle – a company that makes what can only be described as furniture-grade Lego sorting systems, with prices stretching up to £3650 (around $4915, launching in North America later this month) for the Oak edition – I should have laughed it off. Instead, I’ve spent the best part of a week thinking about it.
What is Brickle, exactly?
At its simplest, Brickle is a chest of drawers. But really it’s a piece of engineering that’s been through multiple design iterations and, according to the company, thousands of hours of real-world testing by actual families with actual children who actually lose actual Lego pieces down the back of actual sofas.
The idea is deceptively simple – gravity does the sorting for you.
On top sits a playdeck – a walled surface for building, playing and, when a creation inevitably goes wrong, smashing.
Once you’re done, you sweep everything into drop holes cut into the deck. Those holes are sized and shaped to filter pieces as they fall – big bricks stay near the top, mid-sized pieces fall to the middle, and the tiny, easy-to-lose ones drop all the way through to the bottom drawer.
Underneath all that is a “special pieces” drawer with 41 individually sized compartments for your most treasured minifigs.
The Brickle is capable of comfortably holding up to 15 kg (33 lb) of Lego pieces, while the smaller size is capable of holding around 9kg (20 lb).
It measures 100 x 65 x 56 cm (39 × 26 × 22 in).
Co-building
I’ll admit the sorting mechanism is clever. But it’s not really what’s pulling me in.
My son is three and a half, and he’s just started properly getting into Lego. It’s a great stage to arrive at, and I’d like to give him somewhere nice to explore that.
Not a plastic tub shoved under the sofa. Somewhere he can sit down and focus on building.
The company talks about co-creating “crazy Lego builds” with their own kids around early prototypes, and about wanting families to build their own memories around the finished furniture. That would normally make me roll my eyes, but I’ve currently got a half-built Minas Tirith on my dining table and a toddler who wants to “help”, and I understand exactly what they mean.
There’s also something to be said for how it looks like actual adult furniture rather than kiddie storage – it wouldn’t feel out of place sitting in my living room, which is more than I can say for most toy boxes.
Yes, but is it worth it?
Here’s where the ridiculous part comes in. The standard Brickle starts at £1850 (approx. $2490) in cream, rising to £3650 (approx. $4915) for the oak finish – for a chest of drawers, however handsome, that holds Lego.
That’s before you add matching stools (£210/$285 in cream or black, £430/$580 in oak) and shelves (from £270/$365 in cream up to £550/$740 for the oak Brickle-sized version), because apparently we’re building an entire ecosystem now.
Compare that to a stack of clear plastic tubs from a homeware shop, which will sort your Lego by colour just fine for about £30/$40, and the Brickle starts to look faintly absurd.
It is absurd. This is clearly a premium product, with Teflon runners on the bottom drawer to protect your floors, chamfered drawer edges, European birch plywood that’s FSC certified and sourced from the colder reaches of Scandinavia.
And yet none of that stops me wanting one.
Part of it is genuinely practical – with a build the size of Minas Tirith on the go, some real sorting infrastructure would save me hours of digging through bags for the right shade of grey. But most of it, if I’m honest, is the other thing: the idea of my son having his own special pieces drawer, play area, and somewhere he can tidy up his Lego at the end of the day.
Whether that’s worth £3650 is a question I genuinely can’t answer yet. Ask me again once Minas Tirith is finished and I’m staring at a floor covered in loose bricks.
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