Gingerbread is an architectural style that consists of elaborately detailed embellishment known as gingerbread trim. It is more specifically used to describe the detailed decorative work of American designers in the late 1860s and 1870s, which was associated mostly with the Carpenter Gothic style. It was loosely based on the Picturesque period of English architecture in the 1830s.

During the 1830s and 1840s, American home builders started interpreting the European Gothic Revival architecture, which had elaborate masonry details, in wood to decorate American timber frame homes. This was also known as Carpenter Gothic. The early designs started with simple stickwork such as vertical sawtooth siding. By the middle of the 19th century, with the invention of the steam-powered scroll saw, the mass production of thin boards that were cut into a variety of ornamental parts had helped builders to transform simple cottages into unique houses. At the time, standard sized gingerbread elements were manufactured at low cost in the American East Coast.

Not everyone approved of this architectural style. Andrew Jackson Downing, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival criticized this style in his Architecture of Country Houses in 1852. He classified homes in the United States into three types: villas for the wealthy, cottages for working people and farmhouses for farmers. He argued that the lower-cost cottages which were small in size and had simplistic style should not be ornamented with the elaborate embellishment of a villa. He further argued that the vergeboard of the Rural Gothic gable should have been carefully carved in thick and solid plank to appreciate its beauty instead of an ornamental part which was "sawn out of thin board, so as to have a frippery and 'gingerbread' look which degrades, rather than elevates, the beauty of the cottage."

The style lived on and flourished in the residential areas of Chicago in the 1860s. That didn't last very long as the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed many of those buildings. Some attributed a cause of the fire to be worsened due to the cheap construction materials and the gingerbread decorations in hoping other cities would heed the warning. Still, the style continued to spread to the West. By the late 1870s, San Francisco had many gingerbread houses at a similar level of Chicago five or ten years earlier.

In Ontario, Canada, a house style in the area called Ontario Cottage had been evolving since the 1830s. In the third quarter of the 19th century, the builders incorporated gingerbread elements to large houses. A prominent character was to use ornamental bargeboard and finials to decorate the gables. As railways were expanded into cities such as Stratford, more Ontario cottages and houses were built. They were typically one and a half story to one and three-quarter story brick homes with gingerbread wood trim on gables and the front facade. This type of house became prominent from the 1870s to the 1890s.

In 1878, a fire in Cape May, New Jersey, destroyed 30 blocks of properties of the seaside town. The town rebuilt quickly. Many were rebuilt with much gingerbread trim and many gables and turrets. This resulted in a high concentration of late 19th century buildings in the town. According to the National Register of Historic Places, "Cape May has one of the largest collections of late 19th century frame buildings left in the United States. It contains over 600 summer houses, old hotels, and commercial structures that give it a homogeneous architectural character, a kind of textbook of vernacular American building."

In the 1880s, many houses in California adopted the Eastlake style, which was named after Charles Eastlake a British architect and furniture designer. Eastlake published a book that contained illustrations of interior designs of incised wood panels and knobs to complement his furniture designs. American home builders expanded that to home exteriors by replacing flat-cut gingerbread ornamental elements with lathe-turned spindlework for balusters and wall surface decoration. However, Eastlake criticized the American adaptation as "extravagant and bizarre". The style was later combined with Italianate and Second Empire elements to create the "San Francisco Style".

Residential buildings of wealthy individuals in Haiti during the Gingerbread era, between the 1880s and the 1920s, had a unique architecture that combined the local traditions and adaptation of foreign influences. The adaptation was influenced by many factors including manuals of styles that were circulated from Europe and North America, Haitian architects who studied abroad, and French artisans who set up woodworking shops to train Haitian artisans. Those Gingerbread houses were highly decorative with fretworks, latticeworks with patterns that are unique to Haiti. The structures of this style typically have large windows and doors, tall ceilings, large attics, and deep porches.