The Goto Puzzle

In 2023 Guido Engelke and Matteo De Rossi, two architects in their early 30s, left their studio jobs in the Venetian mainland, determined to carry out the imperiled legacy of Signor Blum, a 45-year-old bottega selling sculptural wooden puzzles and toys since 1978. The workshop, just round the corner from our headquarters, has always been an iconic destination in town, equally popular among locals—buying colorful clowns, animals, and custom wooden name letters for their children’s rooms—and tourists—who opted for the little interlocking gondolas and handmade replicas of Venetian palazzos as souvenirs.

When he first heard that the owners were looking for someone to take over their business, Engelke had never even ventured inside the store. De Rossi had visited it only once, to buy a gift for a friend: a decorative puzzle titled Venetian window with two cats. Yet, looking not only to keep living in Venice but to “do something for the city,” they came forward with an offer. Another friend, Luca Palmieri, joined them enthusiastically as a third business partner. Acquiring Signor Blum meant learning a completely different job—including scroll-sawing poplar wood panels with extreme precision, as well as acquiring the administrative and marketing skills that being entrepreneurs required. Doing so took one and a half years, initially with the support of one of the previous owners, Laura Turchetto, who agreed to stay and help them start. “After a while,” Matteo says, “I was ready to give my friend another Venetian window with two cats. But this time, I made it myself.”

Compared to the previous ownership, which “had settled on softer, darker combinations with a lot of grey and purple,” the new generation introduced brighter, more lively color palettes. They kept the majority of the original designs, progressively digitizing an immense repertoire of drawings assembled over the decades. (Giorgio Del Pedros, the late illustrator behind many Signor Blum creations, was a prolific designer who could “disappear for an entire month when he had to draw something new.”) As architects, they took Signor Blum’s signature replicas of Venetian buildings to unprecedented levels of precision and grace, rearranging and redesigning the elements of the puzzles with softer profiles and less visible cuts. Last year, Engelke and De Rossi crafted a replica of Palazzo Brandolini’s water facade: a temporary scenography for our store, celebrating the launch of the limited-edition glass Palina.

A few months ago, Guido Engelke and Matteo De Rossi delivered a special prototype to our office: a bidimensional, real-size replica of our red Goto glass, repurposed as a clever puzzle of interlocking pieces, easy to assemble and disassemble. Marcantonio—who used to visit the store as a child—had connected with the new, young owners one year prior and commissioned the wooden Goto more as an experiment than with an actual product in mind. Yet, seeing Laguna~B’s first design in this new guise—rendered in a completely different material and transformed into a toy—felt like proof of the Goto’s iconic status.

For the delight of every Goto fan, we commissioned Signor Blum an initial series of 10 wood Goto Puzzles. They’re available in our store only, in Dorsoduro 3276, Venice, or upon private request.

If you want to secure the first pieces in person, we’ll present the collaboration next week at Signor Blum’s store in Campo San Barnaba, Sestiere Dorsoduro, 2840 from 4.30 to 6.30 PM.