We’ve passed by the signs pointing to Puzzle Mansion so many times during our many trips to Tagaytay but we never got around to going to the place. All we knew was that the place literally was a Guinness record-holding mansion full of puzzles. During this latest trip, as luck would have it, Puzzle Mansion was on the way to Wilson’s Place where we stayed.
We headed off to the mansion a little before lunch. From the main road, we had to go further in and passed by these pillars that signaled the mansion was near.
We reached a guard post and a man was making a sign for us to make a left. We didn’t anticipate what we saw next. The blue and white structure can be seen from afar, but the concrete road leading to it was very steep. I
We were led to a dirt parking area which I guess they were still trying to build because there was no way they can get more people to visit what they now consider a local tourist attraction with that kind of garage.
The fee to enter the mansion was Php 100 per person, and we bought our tickets from the makeshift restaurant by the parking area that also sold coconut pie – a famous delicacy we were told. We saw this bit of Filipiniana parked outside the building. It was really eye-catching as it matched the building’s exterior colors of blue and white.
We were led inside the mansion and was greeted by a flood of framed photographs right from the entrance. A photographer asked to take our photo for their Facebook page, which we politely declined. It took us a couple of seconds to realize that everything framed in that house was a puzzle. This one in particular was impressive and it was the first thing that caught our eye as we entered the house.
This awesome collection of puzzles is owned by Gina Gil Lacuna. She started building puzzles some 25 years ago from Disney cartoons to reproductions of famous works of art like Van Gogh’s The Scream and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
A little more organization would do good for this collection because all the puzzles are mixed up. Although they do put the non-framed ones in open glass boxes, like these below:
The collection was all-in-all pretty impressive. Each piece also tells you details of how long it took for Mrs. Lacuna to build it. Her usual finishing time is one hour for a 1000-piece puzzle.
They turned parts of the mansion into a bed and breakfast, which I guess is the reason why all the puzzles were crammed into this one big room. Just when we thought we’d seen everything though, we were told to go upstairs to see her biggest puzzle yet. This one is made up of 32,000 pieces. You can never tell just by looking at it from afar that it was not one big piece.
Right next to her work of art is the souvenir/gift room filled with boxes of puzzles. I wanted to buy just one because they weren’t cheap (we were told by the Ilongga saleslady that those coming from Spain are the most expensive ones), but the husband insisted that we take two home as our project. We chose Van Gogh’s Starry Night with 1000 pieces, and the Mona Lisa with 500 pieces. I wonder when we’d ever get around to putting them together but we’d already planned to start collecting too. Haha!
Puzzle Mansion
Cuadra Street, Brgy Asisan, Tagaytay 4120, Philippines
+63 2 425 5195
(it looks like they used to have a website but it is a parked domain right now)
