Gingerbread Architecture

Gingerbread is an architectural style consisting of elaborately detailed decorative trim known as gingerbread trim, associated with the Carpenter Gothic style of American building in the late 1860s and 1870s and loosely rooted in England's Picturesque movement of the 1830s. It flourished in Victorian era American cities such as Chicago and San Francisco and in resort towns including Cape May, New Jersey and Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. In Haiti it developed as its own distinct regional tradition between the 1880s and 1920s, seen in wealthy residential neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince such as Pacot, Turgeau and Bois-Verna, where European and North American decorative influences were combined with fretwork and latticework patterns unique to Haiti. The style also appears in northern Thailand, where British colonial era gingerbread trim was blended with perforated wood panels and other Asian elements to form what has been called Lanna Colonial style, and in Ontario, Canada, where it shaped the Ontario Cottage style from the 1870s through the 1890s.