This Lego-obsessed city is Europe's best break for kids
For once, my daughters are excited about lunch. They've even knowingly ordered a vegetable, unheard of in their respective five and four years on this planet. But then, they've never before been offered lunch by a robot. Nor ordered it by slotting Lego bricks together and pushing them into a machine.
This is the magic of Mini Chef, the restaurant at the centre of Lego House in Billund, southern Denmark (child meals £15, adult £26). Here meals are made — so the story goes — by a Lego chef in a chaotic kitchen that we watch on a tableside screen. The food then makes its way down a spiral conveyor belt to a pair of robot waitors, Robert and Roberta.
Wearing Lego bowties and fixing us with goggly Lego eyes, Robert and Roberta wave at the waiting children, prompting shrieks and giggles. And there is something for the parents: the menu is heavy on veggies and dishes are tasty (think cauliflower and chickpea curry, and oven-roasted salmon).
I've come with my husband and three young children to visit Billund's Lego House, the 'Home of the Brick', a towering building that appears like 21 giant blocks stacked in the city's central square (from £27, under 3s free; legohouse.com/en-gb). Inside are 25 million Lego bricks, some masterfully composed into models ranging from dinosaurs to a giant tree, the others scattered about in four 'experience zones' ready for building.
Energy levels have been high all morning ever since we were issued with personal — and scannable – bright yellow wristbands at the entrance to Lego House and told to use them to identify ourselves at the cameras stationed around the numerous activities in the four zones. Cue sprints towards buckets of Lego blocks, determined to get there first, and endless jostling in front of screens to grab the perfect memento of the latest creation. The selfies we take using the cameras are stored in the Lego House system for us to access via the QR code on our wristbands when we get home.
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We start by grabbing a Lego base plate to build brick self-portraits of how we're feeling (excited, obviously) and load them into a machine that scans our creations to generate a digital version on screen, which we then watch dance to electronic music. Then we move on to create a fish, which is also rendered digital but then released into an aquarium to swim with — gulp — a giant Lego shark.
Everything is brightly coloured, larger than life, interactive and the girls can't get enough of it all. Their younger brother, who is two, struggles to play along. But then we find the Duplo train builder activity, which engages him in quiet play for long enough that I can take his sisters to the Robo Lab to program a robot. It's simple coding and almost certainly the first they've ever tackled. Still, my four-year-old daughter figures it out before I do and gets her robot to move around the digital garden, planting seeds and watering them to make flowers for the bees, while I jab uselessly at the screen doing all the wrong things. A preview, surely, of our future family dynamics when it comes to tech.
I had thought there might not be enough at Lego House to engage us for an entire day. But, in each zone we walk through, we're constantly pulled from one room to the next by more and more enticing builds to try. Hours pass, we take dozens of photos, and I begin to understand why Lego has long been the world's most popular toy.
I even lose myself in creating an intricate Lego flower, shaping two shades of yellow into petals and combing through seemingly bottomless buckets of blocks to find exactly the right hinge to attach them. I'm normally far too impatient for this sort of activity, yet I probably spend at least 20 minutes here, my daughters both silently building right beside me. By the time I've finished and am planting my flower in the Lego garden, my shoulders have dropped and my breathing slowed. I feel like I do after a yoga class, minus the sore muscles. Only in Billund.
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There are ten Legoland theme parks worldwide, including the one in Windsor, but Billund is the only one with a Lego House. It was in this small Danish town that the local toymaker Ole Kirk Kristiansen invented the brick and it very much remains its home. A large factory and the company headquarters are here and it feels like a town that Lego built — not least because there are vast Lego blocks to climb on in the street, and every second person you see is either wearing a Lego employee lanyard or carrying a bulging bag of goodies from the Lego shop.
You don't visit Billund if you don't love Lego. And, if you do love Lego, you'll almost certainly want to stay in the Legoland hotel. The themed bedrooms run from Arthurian knights to Ninjago ninjas and are decorated with characters built from Lego bricks — we find a ladybird above the bed and a butterfly in the bathroom — and have bunk beds for the kids. It's fun, if a little tired in places, and the castle-themed playground within easy hollering distance of our room is a boon come evening and the need to run off steam before bed.
Billund is a compact place and everything we need is walkable from the hotel. With three children who all require car seats, not needing a hire car is a huge relief. I instantly love the pleasant 20-minute walk from the hotel to the town centre, winding along a pedestrianised riverside walkway lined with large modern sculptures. We stroll this route several times during our May half-term break, walking into the town for cinnamon rolls at Billund Bageri, dinner at one of the simple restaurants (pizza is a fixture) or to let the kids loose in the playgrounds on the roof of Lego House.
One afternoon we walk in for a preview of the Lego Masters Academy, inspired by the TV series of the same name, which will pit talented Lego builders against each other when it launches in September. On the ground floor of Lego House, it will offer hands-on sessions for Lego fans, teaching building skills from foundation level to the technically advanced, for a separate charge (adults and children £23). This is most likely to appeal to AFOLs, or adult fans of Lego — an impassioned community of Lego-lovers who create incredible custom builds, some of which are on display in the Masterpiece Gallery on the top floor of Lego House — but the sessions also cater for builders from the age of five. This makes my eldest daughter the youngest these sessions are suitable for. She's completely captivated from the get-go and creates something far more intricate than I would have imagined she was capable of, which she insists we display the second we get home. I resolve to challenge her more in future and to leave the box of Lego out in the living room more often.
Before leaving Billund, we must, or course, visit actual Legoland (adults and children £37, under 2s free). After all, we can see it from our hotel. This is the original Lego theme park, opened in 1968 as a place to display the company's exhibition of models. Now owned by Merlin, today it's more focused on child-friendly rides. We visit twice to spin on the carousel and giggle ourselves giddy on the Flying Eagle rollercoaster. There are rides even my two-year-old son can enjoy (a Duplo-themed mini train, a safari to see Lego animals) and the girls are cock-a-hoop when they discover that Mummy isn't allowed to accompany them on the Frog Hopper. I strap them in and watch them dissolve into near-hysteria together, whooping each other into the sort of frenzy of jubilation only childhood knows as they're flung up and down a tower like a frog hopping in the air. I find myself grinning and waving non-stop throughout their ride.
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Sure, sometimes parenting means standing back and letting your children have all the fun but on this trip, more often than not, I've been giggling and whooping right along with them. The home of Lego? It's a blockbuster hit. Helen Ochyra was a guest of Lego House. The Legoland Hotel has B&B family rooms from £300, including a two-day ticket to Legoland (legoland.dk/en). Fly to Billund
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