If you’ve been lucky enough to visit LEGO House over the past year, then you probably saw the incredible Belville-scale dioramas of Victoria Worsley on display at the Masterpiece Gallery. Victoria’s latest doll-scale creation is a bustling library where young readers busy themselves among the stacks.
As much as I love minifgs, there’s something charming about LEGO’s larger family of Belville figures that were produced between 1994 and 2009. These days, the accessories and textiles from the line show up in MOCs from builders looking to push the envelope with creative parts use, but very few builders base their creations around the dolls themselves. It’s magical to see the dolls transported into immersive LEGO scenes the way that “Bricktoria” does.
The library is such a cozy, innocent place. And yet there’s something familiar about the U-shaped design, the crimson stairs… and that print of a counting… vampire?
Yup, Victoria based her Belville library on the one from Sunnydale High seen in the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Victoria is intimately familiar with the lair of librarian/Watcher Giles and the Scooby Gang. When she first started building as an adult in 2017, it was one of the first things she set out to build.
She took the concept to the LEGO Ideas platform in several iterations. During the ’90s throw back challenge earlier this year, it came in 5th place (Wallace & Gromit and The X-Files won and are currently in the design phase).
Victoria even made a miniature tribute for the Valentine’s Habitat Challenge earlier this year. (Sadly Spike wasn’t in the Slayer’s love life before the library was blown up, so we have to get Angel.)
Right now the pilot of a new Buffy sequel series is filming with Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to the role of Buffy Summers to train a new Slayer, with Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao directing and Dolly Parton (yes, THE Dolly Parton) among the producers. We asked Victoria her thoughts on the Slayer’s return: “I’m excited to see Sarah Michelle Gellar return and intersted to see where they take the concept. Hopefully it will bring a lot of new fans to the franchise and renewed interest in the original series!” The classic 90s series is definitely a hit with the next generation in my house, being my kid’s favorite show. She was Buffy for Halloween last year!
If you’d like to support Victoria’s Buffy library project on LEGO Ideas, you can back it here.