A home for 80,000 puzzles? Try an Italian castle

NEW YORK: Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, proprietors of the world’s largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while seeking a solution. In total, the Miller collection — an accumulation of collections, and collections of collections — amounts to more than 80,000 puzzles. It comprises some five thousand Rubik’s Cubes, including a 2-by-2-by-2 rendering of Darth Vader’s head.

And there are more than 7,000 wooden burr puzzles, such as the interlocking, polyhedral creations by Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker; they evoke a hybrid of a pine cone and a snowflake and are Miller’s favourites. Miller is fond of their 140 brass, bronze and gold puzzle sculptures by the Spanish artist Miguel Berrocal; Goliath, a male torso in 79 pieces, is “a puzzle that all puzzlers lust after,” she said.

Until recently, the Miller collection resided at Puzzle Palace in Boca Raton, Fla., filling their mansion and a museum (a smaller house) next door. Puzzles occupied even the bathrooms. Then last year, on a whim, the Millers bought a 15th-century, 52-room castle in Panicale, a hamlet in central Italy. They packed their puzzle collection into five 40-foot shipping containers and, for their own transit, booked a cruise from Miami to Rome.

Before sailing away in April, the Millers went on a two-month road trip — “a last hurrah,” Miller called it — visiting puzzler friends from coast to coast. Along the way they accumulated more puzzles. In Garden Grove, Calif., they loaded up a cargo van with 58 boxes from Marti Reis, who donated her collection of folksy punning puzzles by the designer RGee Watkins, such as Diamond Ring, a dime with a metal ring passing through the coin’s center. The puzzle maker Lee Krasnow, who has production facilities in Portland, Ore., and Grand Rapids, Mich., met the Millers at a puzzle party on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, and hand-delivered his famed Clutch Box.

Made from exotic hardwoods and precision machined metals, it opens with a subtle unlocking mechanism; the goal is simply “the thrill of having opened it,” Miller said. “If you’re daring, the goal is to fully disassemble it into about 40 individual pieces.” For the Millers, nothing compared with the thrill of finally getting their hands on the second version of Mega Mansion, their Florida abode miniaturized as a sequential discovery box.

Miller commissioned this creation in Feb 2020 from Tracy Wood Clemons Batz, a puzzle artist in Scottsville, NY; the original construction was irreparably damaged in an ordeal with the courier company. The box opens as the puzzler finds 14 hidden keys and tools that unlock four tiers of discovery in 130 steps. “I hate solving puzzles, I don’t enjoy it at all,” Clemons Batz said in a Zoom interview. “I enjoy stumping people.”

“We run into problems, we solve the problems, that’s what puzzling is all about,” Miller said. When their collection is reopened — circa January 2025 — it will be under the name “World Puzzle Center,” reflecting their bigger dream: not only a museum, but a place for parties and lectures, competitions and research; a space to design, make and play with puzzles.