Puzzle is an isometric cube pattern, the old tumbling-block arrangement in which three rhombi meet to describe a cube and the eye cannot decide whether it is looking at a solid or a hollow. The device is centuries old, common in parquetry and in patchwork, and it depends entirely on the three tones used to build each block.
Here the cubes cascade rather than stack. The arrangement is loosened so that blocks appear to tumble down the wall rather than sit in a rigid honeycomb, which introduces movement and stops the illusion from settling. Depending on the colourway the effect ranges from a calm, close-toned relief to something considerably more disorienting. The higher the contrast between the three tones, the more insistent the three-dimensionality becomes.
A pattern like this wants a plain room around it. It is very good in a hall, a stair, a cloakroom or a study, anywhere the eye passes through rather than settles, and less easy in a room where you sit still for long. Furniture with clean lines suits it; anything carved or curved fights the geometry. Hung across a whole room it becomes an architecture of its own, and the walls stop reading as flat surfaces at all. In a small space that is either exhilarating or exhausting, depending entirely on the colourway.
