Amazingly this came out the same year as 6278 Enchanted Island, which Brickset says sold for $66. Look at the picture of that set, then look at this one and ponder how this sold for $100.

^ I imagine they jacked up the price for all the specific, novelty elements that the Belville sets required (like the large brick baseplates, or the odd lattice walls. This house has no walls beyond pink lattice. Thank goodness there's no bathroom in the building ... although I imagine that would lead to a whole stack of new problems).

The belville sets are full of interesting pieces in awesome coulours. To bad some of the basic bricks in those colours are so rare.

Honestly, I really like this set. It has always appealed to me. Sets that picture everyday life are some of my favorites.

You know I'm trying to think why I'd consider this patronising towards girls but not the Friends or Elves sets. I think its that those modern two have clearly had a lot of work put into designing the sets, making them intricate, creative and fun, whereas this...is just a lot of big pieces slapped together quite simply

I hope LEGO never makes a theme like this again.

The wishes may have been pretty, but this is one ugly set

@natro220: I mean, not that hard to understand: it's huge, and besides its many specialized parts in general, it has some pretty elaborate pre-assembled dolls. A lot of people talk about LEGO having high prices, but a few months ago I was amazed to see how expensive a full size doll set like a Barbie Dream House can be these days.

I suspect LEGO intended for Belville to appeal to kids and parents who were used to those types of products… though naturally, that strategy, so far outside their comfort zone and areas of expertise, didn't result in nearly the same success as the more traditional, building-focused approach they've taken with themes like LEGO Friends.

@Brickalili: A lot of LEGO's early attempts at understanding their audience (including both boys AND girls) were a lot less thorough than the kind of market research they undertook in the mid-to-late 2000s as they were trying to push back against the kind of careless business practices that had brought them to the brink of ruin. For example, when they tested more traditional sets with girls, they found that they often stopped building partway through to play with the figures. In the 90s, the conclusion they drew from that was that girls just weren't interested in building like boys were. But when they were developing LEGO Friends, they looked a bit deeper and found that girls in general still enjoyed building as much as boys — many of them just preferred to take it a bit more slowly, with play breaks in between, instead of racing to finish the builds like boys often did.

It's the same as how from the late 80s to the early 2000s, LEGO saw boys' interests shifting towards video games, and assumed that meant they wanted a kind of instant gratification they weren't getting from traditional toys. This was a big part of why builds throughout the 90s increasingly included big, specialized parts to simplify and speed up the building process. But with the more analytical market research LEGO did after coming close to bankruptcy in 2003, they found that what really made more modern trends like video games, skateboarding, etc. so engaging to so many boys wasn't a sense of instant gratification, but the sense of accomplishment that came with completing tasks that took time and effort to master.

In other words, simplifying the builds in the 90s and early 2000s was actually hurting their ability to compete for kids' attention with those types of hobbies/interests, and recapturing that audience meant shifting in the opposite direction and emphasizing higher piece counts, more advanced building techniques, and smaller, more versatile pieces that would more gradually take shape into a highly detailed model over the course of the building process.

@andrelego: I wouldn't mind another theme that involved larger-scale dolls and dress-up play, but it would definitely be a lot better if you actually got to build the dolls and outfits in a way that felt more authentic to the LEGO building experience.

In other words, something sort of like the old "maxifigs" from the Homemaker/Building Set With People themes, but with more of the degree of playability and posability that we see with themes like Bionicle and Hero Factory, or with the more recent System-based buildable, posable figures and animals in themes like LEGO Super Heroes, LEGO Ninjago, LEGO Legends of Chima, and LEGO Elves.

It might be a bit tricky, since the fashion doll market isn't booming the way it once was, and doll collectors tend to have a lot higher standards of lifelike/human-like shaping and detail than are often associated with the kind of animal, monster, robot, and alien characters we've often seen in constraction sets or as brick-built characters. Even so it's often fun to think about how exactly you might make those types of figures in a way that feels authentically LEGO.