There’s A House Built From 10,000 Gingerbread Bricks In A San Fran Hotel
‘Tis the season for gingerbread, and one San Francisco hotel has truly committed to the cause, erecting a life-size gingerbread house using more than 10,000 gingerbread bricks.
Every year, the Fairmont San Francisco’s lobby is home to the almost-totally-edible gingerbread house, which is a joint project between its engineering and culinary teams. The façade and interior is lined with thousands of gingerbread cookies which are individually attached with 750kgs of royal icing.
A wooden frame is necessary to ensure it stays standing for the duration of the festive season, with work on the house starting back in July. Baking the bricks has taken the best part of five months, while decoration took an entire month.
[media_embed]https://youtu.be/4dUXA0BIQsA[/media_embed]The entire structure is modelled after San Francisco’s iconic Painted Lady Victorian homes and sprawls over 30 square metres and stands almost 8m tall.
On the bottom floor (yes, there’s more than one floor), there’s a toy workshop with a two-metre-tall nutcracker, while the top floor houses a spinning Christmas tree.
A dining room with space for 12 guests was also added this year, but the gingerbread house itself is for looking, not touching.
“We have a lot of overzealous patrons who walk in and actually eat a lot of the coverings of this gingerbread house,” engineer Richard Davis – who’s worked on the house for four out of the five years it’s been built – told Atlas Obscura. “They go to town on it.”
For that reason, the gingerbread house is touched up at least twice a week. It’ll stand in the Fairmont’s lobby until January 2, 2018, when it’ll be dismantled for another year and the food items composted.
It’s enough to tempt even Hansel and Gretel.
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(Lead image: Fairmont SF / Facebook)
