Fairmont San Francisco rings in holiday season with life-sized gingerbread house

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Visitors to the Fairmont San Francisco only have to follow their noses to see the life-size gingerbread house that takes over the historic hotel’s lobby every holiday season.

Standing 22 feet high and 23 feet wide, the floor-to-ceiling edible engineering feat is decorated with nearly 8,000 pounds of gingerbread and 1,500 pounds of icing, with hundreds of pounds of very real candy outlining every wall, window and ledge.

The tradition of the Fairmont gingerbread house goes back more than a decade, when the hotel was brainstorming a new way to capture some of the holiday magic from the city’s downtown and bring it up the steep slopes of Nob Hill.

“We needed to do something bigger, better than anybody has seen before. And out of that meeting came this larger-than-life, best of the west, gingerbread house,” Michelle Heston, executive regional director of marketing communications and public relations for Fairmont Hotels, said in an interview.

Constructing the two-story holiday house starts during the summer months, when the Fairmont’s pastry shop starts churning out hand-baked gingerbread bricks

“It’s a full-time position of baking gingerbread bricks from July all the way up until about October or November,” Jesse Caetano, director of food & beverage for Fairmont San Francisco, said.

Heston added, “It starts to smell like Christmas here when you walk by the kitchen mid-summer. It’s a little off because you’re like, ‘Wait, it’s still hot and sunny? Well, not in San Francisco, but elsewhere!”

Construction of what is possibly the largest gingerbread house on the West Coast begins in October, when the hotel’s engineering team assembles the house’s wooden infrastructure in the hotel lobby.  The pastry team then rolls the gingerbread bricks from the pastry shop in, one sheet pan at a time, physically laying the bricks down and sticking them together with icing.

The sweet structure has undergone dramatic changes since its inception, growing in 2025 to more than three times its original size.

“The first year we did it, it wasn’t two stories, and then it was two stories, and then we added a private dining room, and then we expanded,” Heston said.

“It’s almost an internal competition. How can we make it bigger and better, and how do we bring it to the next level every year? There’s always a little bit of magic. Whether that’s from our engineering team or our culinary team, there are so many different divisions that are involved, that there’s this internal drive to always one-up ourselves.”

Visitors eager to explore this year’s creation can expect to be greeted by life-sized nutcrackers when they enter the gingerbread house and explore a sweetly scented interior decorated with a Christmas village, fireplace, and a Fairmont-branded selfie spot. The roof of the gingerbread house features Santa’s sleigh (with the reindeer), lots of presents, and a glimpse at Santa sliding down the chimney.

The first week the gingerbread house opened, visitors streamed in, some dressed in their holiday best, to witness the tradition of the Fairmont gingerbread house in real life.

“We have to get a photo, it’s fully real, the whole thing!’ one visitor exclaimed inside the house.

“I can smell it, can you guys smell it?” another asked their group as they walked inside the candy creation.

“It smells in here, they must have put something in the air,” a mother said to her child, who responded, “Mom, I think it’s actually gingerbread!”

Though the house towers over the lobby, Caetano said visitors sometimes miss it due to its sheer size and almost stereotypical gingerbread house exterior.

“I had a guest who was standing right next to the gingerbread house, and he looked me in the eyes and politely asked, ‘Could you put me in the direction of the gingerbread house?’ And I said, ‘Sir, it’s actually right behind you.’ It’s so well constructed that he did not even realize that he was actually standing next to the gingerbread house,” he said.

The candy-lined walls are not meant to be touched to preserve the house for future visitors, Caetano said, though Heston added some younger visitors can’t seem to resist.

“I always laugh when you come in early the next morning, especially once the kids are out of school, anybody that’s like five or under, so like 2 1/2 feet lower, you find that there’s a lot of candy missing. It’s too irresistible to some of our little children that come through,” she said.

For those who do take a gumdrop or marshmallow, Heston said that the Fairmont pastry team goes in multiple times a week to touch up the structure and replace any unexpected candy disappearances.

“To see the awe in children when they see it, and they can’t imagine how this is real — ‘I’m walking through a gingerbread house, and there’s more candy than I’ve ever seen in my life’ — I wouldn’t expect anything else,” she said.

After the holiday season ends, hotel employees will disassemble the structure, recycling the house’s wooden frame and composting the gingerbread bricks and any remaining candy. Until then, the gingerbread house at the Fairmont San Francisco will be open for visitors to marvel at until New Year’s Day.

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