LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden review

A surprisingly versatile set that fits in well with a lot of other LEGO ranges and subthemes, LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden is an excellent display piece for any home.

Sitting somewhere between the LEGO Architecture range and the Botanical Collection, 10315 Tranquil Garden is charming and filled with personality, perfectly recreating a carefully-cultivated Japanese garden that shows off the balance between human creativity and the beauty of the natural world.

While the set promises a ‘zen’, meditative build experience, things start fairly slow before getting more interesting as the build progresses. Nothing is too challenging, but as with any set, the process is exactly as relaxing as the builder decides it should be.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden set details —

Theme: LEGO Icons Set name: 10315 Tranquil Garden Release: August 1, 2023

Price: £94.99 / $109.99 / €104.99 Pieces: 1,363 Minifigures: 0

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— Where to buy LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden —

LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden will be available from LEGO.com and LEGO Stores from August 1, 2023.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden build —

With the recent popularity of LEGO sets aimed at mature, sophisticated grown-ups, a set like LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden was inevitable. Tranquil Garden is a hybrid of sorts, combining the best design features from both the emerging LEGO Botanical Collection and the longstanding Architecture range into a compact but beautiful package that is both satisfying to assemble, and tremendously pleasant as a display piece.

A miniature recreation of a Japanese garden, complete with a pavilion, a bridge over a koi carp river and several grey stone lanterns, the set follows in the footsteps of 10281 Bonsai Tree in offering a tiny slice of Nippon culture. The new set even features a similar black base to 10281 Bonsai Tree, making these two sets feel appropriately uniform when placed together on a shelf.

But where 10281 Bonsai Tree is a simple life-sized construction – a LEGO version of the kind of tiny tree that takes years to properly prune and shape – 10315 Tranquil Garden is a world in miniature, with its small building giving a sense of scale, and its wider footprint allowing for greater diversity in the foliage.

The foliage is tremendously important to the impact of the set, as while 10315 Tranquil Garden borrows from the Architecture range, it also goes some way to overcoming that theme’s primary drawback.

Architecture sets, while visually and spatially impressive, often feel somewhat sterile. Yes, these are faithful recreations of iconic landmarks, but there’s no sense of them being lived in. They’re marvels of engineering, rather than a reflection of the wonder and joy of a world filled with variety.

In 10315 Tranquil Garden, on the other hand, the beauty of nature takes centre stage, while human construction is put to one side (literally, thanks to the set’s deliberately asymmetrical design). The set reflects a human building that it designed to fit harmoniously within the natural world, and so rather than being a statement on the might and genius of human creativity, it’s a set that encourages the builder to ponder on humanity’s role within nature.

All of which is to say: this is an artsy set. It’s a set that comes with an air of sophistication, and the LEGO Group is not shy about marketing this as a zen building experience.

The wrinkle with boldly declaring that any LEGO set is inherently meditative is that not everyone builds LEGO the same way. Yes, 10315 Tranquil Garden can be approached in a thoughtful, slow, relaxed manner – perhaps you could put on some music featuring wind chimes or bird song to accompany the experience.

Alternatively, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from putting on some thrash metal or a true crime podcast as the soundtrack for the build. As much as 10315 Tranquil Garden may want you to pause and think while building, this is a LEGO set, it clicks together like any other LEGO set, and you will feel exactly as relaxed as you feel when building any other set.

If you have a habit of making a mistake, carrying on for four pages, realising what you’ve done, and having to pull up all your carefully-laid tile pieces to fix your mistake, this won’t become any less frustrating just because you’re building a pretty Eastern-inspired scene.

To that end, 10315 Tranquil Garden is a bit of a slow starter from a building perspective. The set begins, justifiably, with the construction of the beautiful pavilion and its tiny tea table. This is a nice place to start, because it’s simple and fun, and gives the builder one of the most interesting parts of the set right off the bat.

The pavilion is then put to one side as the build moves on to the construction of the base, the slow addition of layers of terrain, and finally, the pavilion is slotted into place and the set’s various trees and plants are added on last.

While starting with the pavilion is more interesting than beginning with the base of the set, it does have the drawback of making the whole experience feel a little shallow at first. The pavilion is not a complicated build, and, like many Architecture sets, features a fair amount of repetition by necessity. It looks great when completed, but because the build starts with the pavilion before moving on to the base layer of the set, the first half hour of building ends up feeling basic and a bit too easy. There’s not a lot of challenge to these early steps.

Perhaps for some people, the process of clicking together a simple set is exactly the kind of thing that inspires the zen, meditative state that the designers were aiming for, but again, your mileage may vary. The build isn’t so simple in these early stages that the builder can completely zone out, as with the mosaic dots of a LEGO Art set – instead, it simply feels like putting together a set for children.

Interestingly, it’s only when the set goes ‘full mosaic’ with the addition of the transparent tiles that make up the koi carp pond that things start to get interesting. Here, the set begins to feel more nuanced, and as subsequent layers of grass, rock, and other terrain are built up piece by piece, 10315 Tranquil Garden really hits its stride.

This part of the build experience feels the most satisfying, and rather than feeling like any previous Botanical Collection or Architecture set, instead calls to mind the layered construction of recent LEGO Star Wars dioramas – most notably, 75330 Dagobah Jedi Training Diorama, with its murky waters that give way to mossy landscape. (75330 Dagobah Jedi Training Diorama, incidentally, is another set that 10315 Tranquil Garden will pair well with on the shelf, for those who are less enthusiastic about bonsai trees.)

When the terrain is assembled and the pavilion is finally slotted into place (having sat, ignored, to one side for most of the build) it’s time to add the foliage, in an experience that will be familiar to anyone who’s built a Botanical Collection set.

These trees and plants come in several forms, with cherry trees in full blossom recreating the quintessential Japanese view of nature, along with pine trees that remind us that there are, in fact, other seasons aside from spring. Where 10281 Bonsai Tree comes with variations on the set to provide different looks for different seasons, 10315 Tranquil Garden instead has room for multiple plants that each hint at the changes the garden experiences throughout the year.

There’s also a healthy bamboo plant, because of course there is, this is Japan. The plants are designed to be swapped in and out; they slide easily out of holes in the terrain, and the last page of the manual encourages the builder to add a ‘personal touch’ to the finished model.

It’s worth noting the scale of this set: unlike Architecture, which of necessity tends towards microscale, and the Botanical Collection, which more frequently aims for life-size, 10315 Tranquil Garden is minifigure scale. There are no minifigures included with the set, but that won’t necessarily stop anyone from adding some into the scene. Perhaps a NINJAGO character sipping tea inside the pavilion? Or a tourist casually photographing the koi carp.

There could even be the possibility for an enterprising LEGO fan to really add a ‘personal touch’ to the set by ripping it out of its base and attaching it to a LEGO cityscape. The set doesn’t feel too dissimilar to 2021’s modular Chinese New Year garden set, 80107 Spring Lantern Festival, as while there’s obviously a wealth of difference between Japanese and Chinese culture, both sets feature a bridge over koi carp, a pavilion, and bamboo. For anyone who missed 80107 Spring Lantern Festival but wants to add a similar build to their own modular LEGO city, this isn’t the worst fit in the world.

As is clear, there are a lot of sets that 10315 Tranquil Garden can be compared with; an indication of how varied the LEGO portfolio has become in recent years, and a display of how a good LEGO set builds on the work that has come before.

In practice, this means that the set is tremendously versatile and will appeal to a wide variety of different LEGO collectors. Those who enjoy Architecture sets will be able to find a place for it with ease, as will fans of the Botanical Collection. Beyond this, anyone who collects dioramas or even modular buildings will also see a use for the set.

Alternatively, 10315 Tranquil Garden works perfectly well on its own, and if it’s the only LEGO set you want to have on display, it’s a fine choice. Just be warned: considering how many sets this pairs well with, it might not be the only LEGO set you have on display for long.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden characters —

LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden doesn’t contain any minifigures, despite being at minifigure scale. It does, however, contain several printed transparent tiles to represent koi carp. There are two different designs, one of which has also appeared in LEGO Friends 41757 Botanical Garden, and there’s a good chance this design will crop up again in future.

Interestingly, while printed koi carp tiles also appear in the now-retired 80107 Spring Lantern Festival, that set used a pair of different designs for fish, even though the old and new renders are so similar as to be interchangeable.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden price —

LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden costs £94.99 in the UK, $109.99 in the US and €104.99 in the EU. This is a fairly standard price for a set of this size, and while it is more costly than 10281 Bonsai Tree, it does have a notably larger footprint when completed.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden pictures —

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden pros and cons —

LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden is a tremendously versatile set, fitting nicely in the space between several themes and subthemes, most notably Architecture and the growing Botanical Collection.

The promised zen building experience will depend largely on the person doing the building, and the process starts off slow – but it becomes significantly more satisfying as things progress, and the finished model looks absolutely gorgeous.

10315 Tranquil Garden pros	10315 Tranquil Garden cons
Beautiful, display-worthy set	Build experience starts off slow
Fits nicely with many other LEGO sets	No minifigures included
Nice balance of plants and architecture	Only one frog in the box, a massive step back from previous frog-filled sets

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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— Alternatives to LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden —

Considering LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden’s design is a bridge between various themes and subthemes, there are several noteworthy alternatives available for those who want something slightly different, or who simply want another set to pair this with on the shelf. Those who enjoy Japanese architecture will want to consider 21060 Himeji Castle, which provides an iconic Hyogo landmark at a smaller scale but in a larger package.

Anyone who might prefer a Botanical Collection set might like to check out 10281 Bonsai Tree, which comes with a similar base to 10315 Tranquil Garden, and is focused entirely on plant life. Another option for those who enjoy the diorama aspect of 10315 Tranquil Garden is 75330 Dagobah Jedi Training Diorama, although this set will appeal primarily to fans of Star Wars rather than traditional Eastern culture and architecture.

Finally, if you prefer Chinese art and design, 80107 Spring Lantern Festival offers a different culture’s take on a similar koi carp garden, and is a larger set which is designed to fit nicely into a modular building display. Note, though, that this set is retired and as such is more difficult to track down.

— LEGO Icons 10315 Tranquil Garden FAQs —