Built & reviewed by David Richards

Vincent van Gogh knew how to make a night sky anything but quiet. His The Starry Night, painted in 1889, turns the darkness into swirling blues and glowing stars. Rolife’s Starry Night Café brings that expressive atmosphere into a miniature street, with a warmly lit café beneath a wonderfully theatrical sky. To my eye, it feels like a little meeting of Van Gogh’s starry skies and his café scenes.

Of course, the name also brings Don McLean’s Vincent to mind—the song opening with “Starry, starry night”. A suitable soundtrack, perhaps, although certain parts of my build were accompanied by rather less poetic language.

This was a challenging build, but a very enjoyable one. It is the first kit I have made where the forced perspective was such a noticeable part of the construction: a sloping street, angled components, and people and furniture that become larger towards the front. It does the head in a little when you are trying to visualise how the finished model will look. With a final score of 94%, however, you can probably tell that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Summary Table

What Comes in the Kit

There are plenty of pieces here, using a wide variety of materials. Opening the box gives you a fair indication that this is going to be a varied build.

• A lighting set with one LED, two strip lights and a touch sensor
• 14 boards in a mixture of woods and card
• A sticker sheet
• An acrylic board containing the main characters
• A bag of plastic structural pieces
• A bag of three-dimensional accessories

As always, test the lighting before you start and spend a little time getting familiar with the instructions. Rolife still does not provide a parts list, which I continue to find irritating. Adhesive strips are supplied rather than glue; as usual, I immediately set those aside in favour of my own glue.

Build Stage 1: The Sloped Street

The first thing that impressed me was the engineering precision. The pieces came out of their boards very easily, with hardly any burring and very little sanding required. Compared with the last Rolife kit I built, Caroling Cathedral, the stickers actually stuck this time. No extra glue was needed to persuade them to stay put.

The main street is plastic, with acrylic people and tables and chairs that increase in size from the back towards the front. This forced perspective makes the scene appear deeper than it really is, but the furniture at the back is very small, so take your time and pay attention.

Two of the figures have sloping support blocks beneath their legs so that they stand upright in the finished scene. It can look a little peculiar while you are building it, but the angles have a purpose. The front table receives a generous selection of three-dimensional food and accessories, before the completed street assembly is mounted onto the base board.

Build Stage 2: Frontages, Lighting and Freddy Fat Fingers

The touch sensor is fitted at the front and held securely by a clip. Paper plants sit behind the front panel and are reasonably effective, although more experienced builders will probably be tempted to add their own three-dimensional replacements.

Then it is time to start assembling the building frontages. While plugging the touch sensor cable into the PCB, I discovered a small problem: I had fitted the board the wrong way round. Silly me.

Removing the screws and rotating it through 180 degrees turned into quite a challenge for Freddy Fat Fingers. I had to reach through a hole with a tiny screwdriver to get the screws out. The swear box filled up rather quickly.

A rather attractive cat takes its place on the sloping roof—a little cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof moment. This area also receives the single LED and the awning, adding that lovely warm glow over the café.

The left-hand building then goes into position, and this was where I initially thought the kit had lost its chance of a perfect score. There was a curved floor whose position I could not work out or secure properly.

Looking back through the manual while writing this review, I discovered that the problem was user error. Mine, naturally. Had I read ahead carefully enough, I would have seen that this curved section is intended to open outwards at the end, revealing a room with a snooker table. Unfortunately, mine does not have the intended opening feature, because I had already made a mess of that stage.

So, apologies to Rolife: that particular problem belongs to me. I am not changing the scorecard now, but it is only fair to make clear that my difficulty with the opening section was not a manufacturing fault.

Watch the two strip lights, P4 and P5. They are the same length, but work differently. Identify them by the colouring of their sleeves and make sure you install the correct one in each position. Getting the connectors into the PCB is another fiddly job for F.F.F., as there is not much room to manoeuvre.

Build Stage 3: The Right Wall, Backdrop and Roof

The right-hand wall receives its front building and a fir tree, although the tree is not particularly visible once everything is assembled. I was very impressed by how easily the sides fitted together. This is where Rolife’s precision engineering really showed.

The back wall, with its attractive starry-night image, also fitted smoothly. The roof connection was a different matter.

About 5cm of the backdrop extends over the top and needs to be secured to the roof. I found it impossible to do this with the back wall already fitted. The instructions show the assembly being pulled away slightly to make the connection, but that simply did not work for me.

My solution was to remove the back wall, attach the roof to it, then refit the combined assembly. That worked. If you find yourself struggling at the same point, it is worth trying this approach.

The Final Stage: A Golden Frame and an Artist’s Easel

The remaining section of strip lighting is added to an overhang, followed by numerous plastic pieces on the front panel. A dust cover is inserted, and the plastic framework is covered with thin, glittering gold-coloured wooden pieces. Together they create the ornate frame that gives the finished model the appearance of a miniature artwork.

The final accessory is a standalone easel, complete with a Van Gogh-style café painting and an artist’s palette. It is a lovely finishing touch, echoing the scene inside the frame. Being separate from the main model, however, it is also the sort of thing that could easily get misplaced.

Final Verdict

This build took me well over 20 hours. You are continually moving between boards, and some of the angles take a little thinking through. I would place it firmly in the intermediate category: enjoyable for someone with a little experience, but with enough small parts and unusual geometry to demand concentration.

The forced perspective is the real talking point. While you are building, the slopes and changing scales can be difficult to picture. Once assembled, they draw your eye along the street, past the café tables and towards the starry backdrop. The contrast between the cool blue buildings and warm café lighting makes the finished scene particularly effective.

Despite my PCB mishap, the confined connectors and my self-inflicted snooker-room problem, I would rank Starry Night Café as one of the best Rolife kits I have built. The precision of the parts, the variety of materials and the finished presentation made it a thoroughly rewarding project.

Final score: 94/100. A challenging, very enjoyable build—and one worth taking your time over. Preferably with a read through the whole manual before Freddy Fat Fingers starts tightening screws.

More Rolife Kits to Explore

If this style appeals to you, there are six more kits in the range to look at:

• Holiday Café
• Library of Wonders
• Sunset Isle — read John MacInnes’s review
• Wisdom Stationery Shop — read D.J. Gibson’s review
• Whisper Magic Shop
• Treasure Toy Shop

Save 15% on Rolife

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