Gingerbread, in architecture and design, elaborately detailed embellishment, either lavish or superfluous. Although the term is occasionally applied to highly detailed and decorative styles, it is more often applied specifically to the work of American designers of the late 1860s and ’70s. During the post-Civil War period of affluence, a style that has come to be known as “stick style” was employed in the decoration of both public and private buildings. Every external vertical or oblique surface of these buildings and many an arch were decorated with fanciful hand-carved wooden latticework.
The principal architectural feature of this style, which was loosely derived from the Picturesque period of English architecture of the 1830s, was the veranda. Beach resorts on the Atlantic Ocean, such as Cape May in New Jersey and Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., provide excellent examples of stick work, as do the opera houses and mansions of the mining boomtowns of the Wild West.