The building blocks of love

As a new series of Lego Masters readies to air, we meet the woman behind 'the Brickman' - and learn how their beginning laid the foundation for a romance built to last.

- SUE SMETHURST

For someone known for his meticulous attention to detail and to-the-brick planning, Ryan McNaught was uncharacteristically spontaneous when it came to one of the most important moments of his life.

In June last year Ryan, who is best known as ‘the Brickman’ from Nine’s hit television series Lego Masters, proposed to his partner of seven years, Tracy Britten, while on holiday in Las Vegas, but it was what happened next that surprised them both.

“We had this moment of wondering when we should tell our families,” says Tracy, who hails from Canada.

“We knew that once we shared the news we were engaged, their first question would be ‘when’ followed by ‘where’ we would marry, Canada or Australia? Knowing it could make life complicated for everyone if they had to travel, in the spur of the moment we said, ‘Let’s just get married right here, right now’.”

And so it was, two days later, that the popular TV co-host and his fiancée pledged their love and commitment to one another before an Elvis impersonator, wearing whatever was in their suitcases – their hearts on their sleeves.

“It was so much fun, just perfect,” Tracy says. “We had a great time.”

As series five of Lego Masters launches onto our screens, The Weekly is meeting the newlyweds and taking a sneak peek inside the Brickman empire.

From the outside, Brickman HQ seems like an unassuming factory in a line-up of identical industrial buildings just a stone’s throw from Melbourne airport, but behind an unassuming steel roller door is an Aladdin’s cave of Lego treasure: 35 million Lego bricks stacked from floor to ceiling in every colour, shape and size imaginable.