San Francisco’s most iconic buildings are now a 4,200 brick LEGO diorama

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Every city has one view that ends up on the fridge magnets, and San Francisco settled that argument a long time ago. It’s the row of Victorians on Steiner Street facing Alamo Square, seven Queen Anne houses put up between 1892 and 1896 by a developer named Matthew Kavanaugh, who liked them enough to move in next door. They’ve since appeared in roughly 70 movies, shows and ads, most famously as the establishing shot of Full House, a sitcom whose cast never actually lived there. The houses have a nickname (Postcard Row), a backup nickname (the Seven Sisters), and a level of fame most buildings would commit crimes for.

Wonderbrick_design went to California a few months ago, came home charmed, and built the whole street. The San Francisco Street runs to roughly 4,200 pieces and stretches 50cm across, with three Victorian facades on a sloping baseplate and a cable car climbing the hill beside them. Each house opens from the back like a dollhouse, the roofs lift off, and there’s a jazz dance academy, a surfer’s place and an artist’s home waiting inside. He built it with his sister, who teaches modern jazz, so one of those houses is hers. It’s a Staff Pick already sitting at 6,491 supporters.

Designer: Wonderbrick_design

Worth knowing before you look too closely at the colours: they’re a 1960s remix. The architecture is 1890s Queen Anne, all gingerbread trim and bay windows and Victorian restraint. Then in 1963 a local artist called Butch Kardum started repainting grey facades in lime, vermilion, gold and turquoise, other colourists piled in, and the city quietly redecorated itself. The term “Painted Ladies” only arrived in 1978, via a book. So the most photographed houses in America are a century-old building wearing a sixty-year-old outfit, and this MOC (My Own Creation) nails the outfit. Salmon pink, curry yellow and sand blue, white trim on everything, with a sand-green conical turret capped by a tiny gold finial.

That turret is my favorite thing here. Cones are miserable to build in LEGO because the system hates anything that tapers, and Wonderbrick_design has shingled the whole thing, stacked three storeys of bay windows underneath it, and then still found room for a wrought-iron fence over the basement level. Behind it, the dance academy occupies the ground floor with a black upright piano and a mirror upstairs, the yellow house holds a surfboard with a shark mouth painted on it leaning against an armchair, and the blue house has an artist at work with an easel, canvases and paint tins.

The whole baseplate is pitched, so the sidewalk, the stone retaining wall, the curb tiles and the track all descend together, and the cable car sits at a genuine angle rather than parked on a flat road pretending. Look at the rails and there’s a slot running down the middle, which is exactly how the real thing works. San Francisco cable cars carry no engine. A steel rope moves under the street at a constant 9.5 mph, powered from a building on Mason Street, and the gripman works a lever that clamps onto it. Andrew Hallidie got the system running in September 1873, and it survives today as the only moving National Historic Landmark in America.

LEGO has flirted with this material before, tucking a microscale Postcard Row into the 2019 Architecture skyline set, and builders keep proving the appetite is real. Peter_Designs pitched a 2,997-piece Ascensor da Bica at 20.5 degrees to match Lisbon’s hills a couple of years back. Minifig-scale San Francisco remains unclaimed territory.

With 766 days on the clock and 6,491 supporters banked, the climb to 10,000 looks very doable. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here. The only thing missing is a string and a winch to pull that cable car up the hill for real.

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This Walnut Console Has Faders That Move Themselves to Match Your Lights

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Smart home hardware has a quiet, persistent problem nobody bothers fixing: physical switches and sliders forget the truth the moment someone changes a light from their phone instead. A dial stays wherever it was left, even after the bulb it supposedly controls has dimmed to nothing through a voice command in another room. One maker’s walnut console solves that mismatch directly, using motorized faders that physically move themselves to match whatever’s actually happening in the house.

The mechanism borrows straight from professional audio mixing desks, where motorized faders have handled exactly this kind of state tracking for decades. A large aluminum knob on the console cycles through banks, each one representing a different room or light group, shown on a small built-in display. The moment a new bank gets selected, all four faders glide on their own to wherever that room’s lights currently sit, no manual resetting required.

Designer: Alex Dufetel (Sacreblue Studio)

That synchronization runs in both directions, which is the detail that actually matters here. Dim a bedroom light from a phone app while sitting on the couch, and the console’s fader for that room quietly slides to match, entirely unprompted. It’s a small piece of choreography that turns a static piece of furniture into something that stays honest about the state of a house, rather than just accepting whatever position it was left in.

Four buttons sit beside the faders, handling lighting presets rather than individual brightness levels. Their assigned function changes depending on which room bank happens to be active, so a single row of buttons effectively serves every room in the house without needing a dedicated switch panel screwed into every wall. Pressing the same physical button in different rooms triggers a completely different lighting mood each time.

Building and testing all of this against sixteen actual light fixtures scattered through a house would slow any project down considerably. Instead, a compact 4×4 grid of small diffused LEDs stands in for the real thing, with each row representing one room’s bank of four lights. That miniature rig let the whole system get debugged safely on a desk before ever touching a single fixture wired into the house’s actual power.

Materials do plenty of the storytelling here too. The body is solid walnut rather than injection-molded plastic, and the rotary knob along with the fader caps came off a CNC machine cut straight from aluminum stock. Even the current painted-wood faceplate, a placeholder ahead of a planned black anodized aluminum version, already reads closer to a finished audio interface than a hobbyist circuit board bolted into a project box.

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A ‘Wolverine’ DualSense controller so feral it makes the actual game look tame

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I distinctly remember the Wolverine game hype. It’s quite literally why I bought a PS5… well, that and GTA VI. And then September rolled around, the game released, and it was instantly trashed for its patronizing game design, made to feel so sandboxed and easy that some people literally played through missions without touching their controller. The game might have been trash, the graphics and the hype definitely weren’t… and while I most certainly won’t be spending my well-earned money on a copy of the Wolverine, I would buy this controller in an absolute heartbeat!

Designed by an artist by the name of FAZ, this Wolverine-themed DualSense controller is about as unhinged as Logan in his boundless rage, slashing away at enemies without a hint of holding back. Wolverine in his peak form is pure animalistic rage, and this controller captures that while still honoring the superhero part of the equation. The controller is themed after the outfit, and rather cleverly leans into the parts of Wolverine that aren’t adamantium. There are no metal accents, fake claw motifs, or anything that would feel like maybe a visual crutch. There’s just the yellow and black, a hint of distressed fabric, a few scratches, and copious amounts of spattered blood… probably of Logan’s enemies.

Designer: FAZ Des

For the unitiated, FAZ is a South Asia-based visual designer and creative director, working primarily with an iPad Pro and boundless creativity. FAZ’s Instagram isn’t a chronicle of his work, it’s a gallery of videos showing him creating designs, taking you through the WIP journey rather than showing you the final product. In an AI slop-filled world, FAZ actually shows you the man-hours instead of the final images, and that’s refreshing. Not to mention the fact that he’s freakishly talented too, using a mere sculpting app on the iPad (Nomad Sculpt, if you’re asking), to create designs as beautiful as this Wolverine-themed controller.

The controller’s color scheme is but obvious. Even the game leans heavily into the black and yellow visual DNA that is Marvel’s Wolverine, and it only makes sense that FAZ would stick to the same palette for his controller. The yellow remains glossy, while the black parts have a corduroy-style texture on them. What I personally find highly interesting is that the controller doesn’t use the Adamantium theme anywhere, not on the joysticks, the function buttons, or even the triggers. I guess it’s FAZ’s way of saying that the indestructible metal doesn’t define Wolverine, his personality when he dons his costume does. To be honest, I could totally work with that.

The controller also has a fair amount of blood on it, added to reinforce the NSFW nature of Wolverine’s work. A good Wolverine fight doesn’t see him effortlessly destroying his enemy. It sees a struggle, it sees Wolverine taking a beating, bleeding, healing, and reaching that animalistic flow state while he fights his enemy to the death. That specific moment is what this controller captures so well – not the polish of a Wolverine who hasn’t entered the battlefield yet. Rather, the avatar of Wolverine after he’s done slicing and dicing his opponents, as the adrenaline wears down.

The only real caveat here is that FAZ made this as a pure concept. Unless some third party reaches out and helps 3D print and fabricate the skins for this, there’s no realistic universe in which this controller would exist. I’m pretty sure Marvel and Insomniac Studios have resigned to the negative press Wolverine’s getting and don’t really plan on milking this particular cow anymore, especially after pouring hundreds of millions into its development. That doesn’t change the fact that this controller looks absolutely wicked, and that I’d pay a pretty penny for it, even if I don’t care too much about the game itself!

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