rich_jacko

The Ninjago City / Temple of Airjitsu complex is massively impressive, but it's just too damn big to fit in with my ever-growing modular city. Plus, you know I can rarely resist messing around with official sets. So I decided to keep the bits that fitted best, and rebuild them into a smaller (but still 2,642-piece set, with another 100 pieces for the mini-figures) modular Japanese restaurant, on a suitable scale. Here's the result:

The new building is two storeys. I've kept the frontage of the seafood restaurant from the city set (including the crab above the door!), flattening it out so it no longer wraps around a corner. Above, I've used mainly pieces from the temple to create a matching upper floor, and transferred an interesting feature window from the city set to differentiate the upper floor above the alley, with the alley itself being completely new.

At the back, I've created a courtyard with the temple fountain, and added flowers, paving and other features. It makes a nice little space as a miniature Japanese quarter to the town. The comic store and fashion shop from the city set round off one side of the courtyard.

The ground floor of the restaurant is mostly taken up by the amazing rotating sushi bar from the city set (with a few added dishes). The comic store is unchanged. Besides that, the rest of the ground floor layout was mainly determined by access - As well as the alley entrance, I needed to include doors to the various premises off the courtyard, and staircases to the upper floor of the restaurant as well as the fashion shop.

Upstairs, the restaurant includes a kitchen area with the rotary crab cooker (which was a pain to transfer into this build!) and the toilet from the city set, as well as a new raised area with more seating. The fashion shop needed careful planning as to what to keep. It's a fair bit smaller than the shop in the city set, and I had to work the staircase access into the design. I'm happy with the result though, as it keeps most of the elements I liked about the original.

The roofs were a pretty straightforward build. The main roof is mainly just a repackaging of elements from the city roof, especially at the front. The fashion shop roof was dead easy at less than 100 pieces. But they both do the job.

Here's the completed restaurant in the modular street. I think it fits in okay: