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Look around and you can find gingerbread house ideas just about anywhere online and offline. Sure, you could follow whatever directions are included in a gingerbread house making kit, but you’re already good with home improvement tools and maybe even crafted a DIY centerpiece, so why not think outside the box? This year, consider taking a more elevated approach to the traditional Christmas village house by adding extra detailing with icing to the front door or implementing  innovative candy accessories for decadent landscaping. You might even find decorating inspiration from precious childhood memories or perhaps a classic holiday film. Dare we suggest recreating an existing house in yummy gingerbread form?

“Instead of thinking in the context of a gingerbread house, start at zero and think of your dream home to spend the holidays with your family or friends,” suggests interior designer Kelly Wearstler. “This may begin with a specific design style or time period that you’d like to replicate. Then, you can consider different shapes, rooms, and features that you can start layering in—it is all about the fantasy.”

As with any DIY project, creating a gingerbread house takes some serious planning. You’ll likely need to do some sketches and crunch some numbers before the baking stage begins. This craft is not one to do hastily, cookie masonry will definitely take up a few hours, but the eye-catching results will pay off in the end, even if you have a mini mental breakdown halfway through the construction. 

Whether you’re looking for something to base your next gingerbread house on or just need some inspo for this year’s construction, peruse these 20 gingerbread house ideas as you build out your own sugar fantasy this holiday season.

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For Kelly Wearstler, gingerbread houses are a holiday staple. When conceptualizing her California-inspired gingerbread house last year, she created something that melded the Christmas tradition with her SoCal roots. “Individuality is key,” she emphasizes, encouraging people to break away from the typical mold. “I say create something that is personal to you and where you’ll be celebrating your holiday!”

Midcentury-modern architecture at its sweetest, a gingerbread house by Mary Figueroa.

Before Mary Figueroa started working as a curator of history at the Indiana State Museum, she made gingerbread houses competitively throughout high school. “Part of it was, I love architecturally beautiful houses,” Figueroa explains. “Being able to create little minis makes it a lot more accessible.” Which is why, when the opportunity to recreate an Eames house while working as an assistant archivist for Herman Miller presented itself, it was a natural choice to say yes. 

One stipulation in the national gingerbread house competitive building contest is that all parts are entirely edible. For Figueroa, this meant relying primarily on gingerbread and icing for her midcentury model. When it came to the windows, she used the age-old gingerbread building trick for making them: a mixture of sugar and water. It’s taken Figueroa quite a bit of trial and error over the years to hone her approach, but here’s what she finds works for her. She mixes two cups of water, 3 ½ cups of granulated sugar, and one cup of corn syrup in a medium-large pot on medium/high heat. She’ll constantly stir the mixture as it comes to a boil, then she’ll submerge a candy thermometer in the pot and wait until the heat reaches 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Figueroa then immediately removes the pot from heat. With her already baked gingerbread pieces on a very flat surface covered in wax paper or aluminum foil, she pours the syrup-like mixture in the window holes. The sugar typically hardens within 10 or 15 minutes, so Figueroa recommends moving quickly so your mixture doesn’t harden before you’ve filled all of the windows. 

This was especially a challenge when making the curvy window-enclosed patio at the back of the house. It wasn’t part of the original house, but Figueroa thought it was a cool detail she needed to include. “I kind of created this little mold out of Styrofoam and then tin foil,” Figueroa says. “Then I just poured the sugar on that, [and] let it sit. I also made a mold for the two sides, and then attached all of those sugar pieces together using icing.” 

An Epicurious gingerbread house by Judy Kim that the Brady Bunch would love.

Did you know that you don’t have to stick with regular gingerbread dough when making a gingerbread house? Other doughs can provide a different color or tone to your house, like this cardamom cookie dough that food stylist and recipe developer Judy Kim made for Epicurious in 2020. “The cookie provides a bright background for the decor, which skips the classic candy overload, and focuses instead on cool-toned shimmer and shine,” Kim told Epicurious. 

Even if you’re a gingerbread house-making novice and feel more comfortable with a precut kit, this midcentury-modern house from World Market is simple to put together. Like with your average house, embrace all architectural styles. Build off the modern structure and have fun with abstract stones made with multicolored candies. 

Even the moss is edible on this @lanibakes gingerbread wonder.

When Elana Berusch of @lanibakes on Instagram made her fairy cottage-inspired gingerbread house, she pulled from the whimsical fantasies and imaginations she had as a kid. “My best friend and I were obsessed with making fairy houses—with bark and moss and all of that. So this was very much my adult tribute to the fairy houses of my childhood.”

To achieve this, Berusch replicated some bark and moss details with intricate chocolate icing curls and painted the gingerbread roof with black cocoa to give it that “aged tar look.” She even made edible moss to top it all off, finding the recipe from @funkybatter on Instagram. Mix together an egg, superfine sugar, and corn syrup along with flour and baking powder. Add in a leaf green gel color, then microwave it in a shallow dish for 90 to 120 seconds. Keep the dish upside down on a wire rack and, once cooled, put it between two pieces of parchment paper and press down.

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Keep your architectural design minimal with an A-frame. Made by @constellationinspiration on Instagram for Cherry Bombe’s holiday issue last year, it’s a little easier than other more intricate houses and comes together in a few hours.  

Asbjørg Nesje used real floor plans to create is enormous cookie construction.

“Go big or go home” might as well be the motto of Asbjørg Nesje, whose family gingerbread house-making tradition is grand, to say the least. The construction is similar to building an actual house from scratch. Having access to floor and building plans to get your measurements just right is of the greatest importance, along with ensuring that everything is reinforced. A bit of sanding might even be necessary to get your edges as precise as possible, Nesje suggests, especially when it comes to this recreation of the Norwegian Parliament building.  

Meringues make this castle a top contender.

Each year, the Museum of Architecture in London hosts a Gingerbread City featuring a menagerie of architectural confections full of inspiration for your next gingerbread house. Though the base of this Crumble Castle stays pretty simple—with mostly white icing detailing—it has colored meringues on the top of its towers to make for a colorful and playful recreation of tower spires.   

A Victorian take on gingerbread for Elanne Boake.

Sometimes giving a gingerbread house a paint job doesn’t mean pulling out the icing or making a whole new kind of cookie dough. Rather, all it takes is some candies or, for Boake and her pink Victorian house, pink strawberry Pocky snacks that she found at an Asian mall to create rosy wood slating.  

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Have extra gingerbread dough you want to make use of (or don’t want to eat)? Make a star cookie or other extra shapes to affix to the top of your house in lieu of a chimney.

Like we said, you don’t need to use gingerbread for your house and, in fact, using other types of cookie dough can bring a new hue to your construction. Take this sugar cookie house made by Zoë François (@zoebakes), for example. The moment François saw this house, she knew (A) she wanted to live in it and (B) she wanted to recreate it using sugar cookies. “The ornate details of the columns, cornices, and corbels all looked like something you’d find on a wedding cake,” François tells AD over email. The cream color of the sugar cookie more closely resembles the original house and adds a more eye-catching White Christmas vibe, while all the architectural detailing looks positively decadent when rendered with icing.  

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A vibrant cardamom house by @spabettie on Instagram ditches the sugar glass windows in favor of the easier approach: outlining one with sprinkles and icing. Whimsical detailing comes from multicolored sprinkles that double as a confection-forward alternative to replicating stone or wood.

This gingerbread house gets an A+ for creativity.

School is going to be out for holiday break, but surely students wouldn’t mind sticking around this sugar-forward school. Not only does it deviate from the typical “house structure,” the gingerbread university uses jumbo candy canes as support columns, which would be a dream to walk through on the way to class.

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Kinda Loughran found inspiration for her gingerbread house in an actual house that her architect mother, Bana Choura of Choura Architecture, had designed. Though the style of the house itself is relatively simple, Loughran and her mother implemented common grocery goodies that double as real life objects. “Okay, what are materials that we can use to build things?” Loughran says she asked herself. “Our goal is very much to have it look more like a house than a gingerbread house that has a lot of bright colored candies or something as decorations.” The final touches: shaved almonds as shingles, chocolates to replicate stone detailing, and raspberry-shaped candies dusted in icing sugar made for lovely snow-covered bushes.

A new take on cocoa and construction by Baked by Melissa.

This inspo list has shown you you can make a gingerbread house using regular old gingerbread, sugar cookie dough, cardamom, and now hot cocoa. Melissa Ben-Ishay, founder of Baked by Melissa, explains you can make something inspired by everyone’s favorite warm holiday drink by simply adding a cup of store-bought cocoa mix and one tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa powder to royal icing, the standard icing used for gingerbread house. Another pro tip: If you aren’t planning on eating your house and want to add even more structural integrity, Ben-Ishay recommends cardboard boxes as a base to build on.

Snap! Crackle! and Pop! for Rice Krispies chimneys.

This gingerbread farm from the Museum of Architecture’s Gingerbread City does an exceptional job of incorporating other sweet treats to capture the details of real life objects, mainly with the windmills sculpted out of Rice Krispies Treats. They’re topped with gingerbread-and-sprinkle encrusted spokes and colored candy to add an extra bit of fun. 

This gingerbread factory happens to have Art Deco vibes.

Gingerbread houses are about combining imaginary with reality by recreating real life items in whimsical ways using something sweet. All of the gingerbread houses on this list exemplify that, especially this Gingerbread Factory that’s giving extreme Willy Wonka vibes and doesn’t shy away from capturing every single detail of the factory, right down to the steam coming out of the exhausts pipes—which was actually made using strung together marshmallows.  

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Interior designer Kari Anne Kaldon (@kariannekaldon) has always made Christmas cakes for the holiday season, but this year she decided to give gingerbread house building a try. “I have a client up in Delaware and I love their home. It was built in 1927 and I really wanted to recreate it,” she says. “I also loved the idea of a stone chimney, but then decided to do an all stucco look based on a photo a friend sent me. My thought was to do something less challenging for my first attempt.”

While she used a store-bought gingerbread frame to help save time making the traditional house, Kaldon added lightweight wafer cookies covered in halved raw almonds to replicate a chimney and its stonework. For a snow-dusted roof, she used halved frosted Mini Wheats, and skinny black licorice for clean-cut window panes. Shaved coconut makes for fine snow too

Simple white icing creates an elaborate display.

Piping white sugar icing is a simple and inexpensive way to decorate. Look to lace for gingerbread house ideas that will stand out from the rest.

Elanne Boake made stained glass windows as she baked the gingerbread.

Though a lot of people will make windows for the gingerbread houses by boiling sugar and water, Boake opted instead to make stained glass windows for her modern cabin by melting down different colored Jolly Ranchers in the window holes of the house when she baked her cookie. “It’s so much easier than doing the whole ‘make your own melted sugar,’” Boake adds. 

Embarking on a gingerbread house can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be if you start small. A basic shape with colorful icing is all you need to get this holiday tradition going 

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