QPuzzles - Brighton Beach Boxes 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

The Brighton bathing boxes on Dendy Street Beach, 1000 pieces and 70 x 50 cm finished. Australian made, cut and boxed in Queensland, and one of the most photographed sights in Melbourne.

What you are looking at

A row of timber bathing boxes running away down the sand, shot low and close so the nearest one fills the frame. Red with a yellow gable and a yellow door, then the famous navy box with the Australian flag painted across its front, then aqua with an orange door, lilac, yellow, green, and on down the line until they are just chips of colour against the trees. Weatherboard walls, corrugated iron roofs, timber decking and duckboards on the sand, under a high blue sky with cirrus cloud.

A shed with no power and no water is worth about $400,000. There are 93 of them, they have no electricity and no plumbing connections, and prices have gone from around $58,000 in 2000 to roughly $400,000. They change hands rarely, usually within families, and occasionally at auction.

The colour is the only thing the owners are allowed to choose. The boxes are on the Victorian Heritage Register and protected under state heritage legislation, and a Planning Scheme Heritage Overlay requires the Victorian form to be kept: painted weatherboards, corrugated iron roof, the same scale and the same alignment down the beach. Owners may paint them however they like within that. So the entire riot of colour in this picture is what happens when you tell ninety-three people they can change exactly one thing.

The first boxes went up in the 1860s to protect the modesty of bathers, and in 1934 the boxes from neighbouring beaches were moved here and set back from the high-water mark.

What it is like to build

This is a colour puzzle, not a shape puzzle. Every box is the same object in a different paint, so the picture hands you eight or nine self-sorting piles before you start. Split the box by colour first and most of the work is already done.

Build the nearest three boxes and use their edges as the ruler. The weatherboard lines run horizontally and the gable lines run at a constant angle, so a piece either continues a line or it does not, and there is very little guessing.

The sand is the difficulty and it is a third of the picture. Pale, granular and almost featureless. Sort it by how warm the tone is and by whether a piece carries a shadow edge, a footprint or a scrap of seaweed, because those are the only landmarks you get. The sky is the same problem in blue, so leave both until the boxes are done.

The far end of the row, where the boxes shrink to a few pieces each, is the fiddliest part. Save it for when you have the near boxes in and can count along the line.

Why QPuzzles

QPuzzles is Australian owned and operated, manufacturing at Ashmore on the Gold Coast, and cutting and boxing their puzzles there rather than outsourcing. Eco-friendly board and kid-safe inks.

A photographic title, so the colour has nowhere to hide. Print quality is what decides whether the aqua box and the pale green box behind it stay separable at the far end of the row, and this one holds.

Specifications

A little context

If you want a puzzle that a non-puzzler will happily sit down at, this is one of the best in the range. The colour sorting gives a beginner an obvious way in, the subject is recognisable enough to keep them interested, and the sand at the end is where you take over.

More like this: our Australian puzzles, Cities and Landmarks, Scenery and Landscapes, and everything from QPuzzles.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.