WHEN he was a child, Neo Chun Guan fondly remembers spending hours building Lego sets once his homework was completed.

“I didn’t have many Lego sets then, so I would always take them apart to rebuild them,” says Neo, a technology lead with an advertising agency.

But as his school workload got heavier, building of Lego sets was set aside. Neo has since returned to his hobby with fervour. 

He credits building the Lego version of the Tower of Orthanc from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for taking him out of the “Dark Age” almost a decade ago.

In Lego lingo, the Dark Age refers to a period of time between when a person loses interest in Lego and when they rediscover it as an adult.

Neo is proud to call himself an AFOL – adult fan of Lego – and his home is a testament to that. 

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He has a dedicated space in his study, where he spends a few hours each day after work on his Lego. There are shelves where he displays his Lego modular buildings and helmet collections. And he is surrounded by more shelves and drawers, filled with Lego bricks, and all neatly categorised according to their size and colours.

In another bedroom, there are more Lego boxes and completed sets. Outside the bedrooms, there are more Lego pieces, including several from Star Wars, on the shelves.

Those pots of “flowers” outside his home? They are made of Lego bricks too.

Neo and his wife – who is also a technology lead, but for an e-commerce company – have even incorporated Lego into the design of their home. For example, their kitchen back splash is made out of Lego bricks in a myriad of colours. Two walls in the living room have been fitted with Lego baseplates, so that they can create their own Lego artworks on them.

When the couple did their wedding shoot in Taiwan, they also lugged along their Lego collection as props. “That was a bit tricky as some pieces came apart along the way,” says Neo, who influenced his wife to move to Lego from nanoblock.

Neo says he is lucky that his wife is also into Lego and some of their sets were purchased by her. “Some of my friends’ wives don’t allow them to display any Lego at home,” he says with a laugh.

He now prefers to build larger sets compared to small ones, because he finds the former more challenging. “They also look more impressive when completed and there is a bigger sense of satisfaction,” says Neo.

His favourite set is the 6,020-piece Hogwarts Castle, from the Harry Potter series, that took him several nights to finish. Neo, a Harry Potter fan, will take on the Hogwarts Express Collectors’ Edition next. The 5,129-piece set is a 1:32 scale replica of the train and comes with movable parts and lights.

Neo has set his eyes on purchasing the 10,001-piece Eiffel Tower set. Standing at 1.5 m, it is the tallest Lego set. The only problem is “there’s no space at home for this”, says Neo.

In fact, Neo has had to dismantle some pieces upon completion when he ran out of space to display them. The bricks are then stored in Ziploc bags.

Neo also has some Lego End of Life (EOL) sets, which are those that are no longer in production. The life cycle of a Lego set depends on popularity and theme, and is usually one to three years after release. 

Among them include the Grand Carousel set, which was launched in 2009, priced at US$250 then. The set is now only available on the resale market, and Neo paid S$800 for it. A brand-new set costs S$2,740 on the resale market.

The carousel moves and comes with sound. “It is a rare set, which was why I wanted it so much,” says Neo.

He is also one of the few collectors who has two 19-inch (48.3 cm) Lego Minifigures. As these are used as store displays, they are hard to come by. “They are only put up for sale when a store closes,” says Neo; he got them from a reseller.

While most of his sets are from Lego, Neo also experiments with designing his own, such as a Santa Claus figurine, which is out on display for the season. Based on a photograph, Neo built the figurine.

But for some others, he uses a software program to map out the number and types of pieces needed, also to create a set of instructions. He buys loose Lego bricks for these creations.

Neo finds building Lego relaxing. “I don’t think about anything else when I’m working on a set,” he says. “At the same time, I appreciate the process of building, and seeing how some bricks can be used in different ways.”