- Josh Taylor is the on-site director of engineering at the Fairmont San Francisco.
- Each year, he leads construction of a two-story edible gingerbread house in the hotel's lobby.
- This is what it takes to build the giant house, as told to writer Molly O'Brien.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Josh Taylor, director of engineering at the Fairmont San Francisco hotel, about his job. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The gingerbread house is 22-feet tall, 23-feet wide, and from front to back it's 10-feet deep. There are 1,500 pounds of royal icing and 7,750 pieces of gingerbread that go into its construction. This year, The Fairmont partnered with See's Candies, which supplied hundreds of pounds of sweets to use as decorations on the house.
We've been building this gingerbread house each year for more than a decade.
It's quite a bit of work — the pastry and culinary team put in about 375 hours making the actual gingerbread (including baking and applying the gingerbread bricks to the exterior) and my construction and engineering teams put about 520 hours of time into getting the wooden frame up and the mechanical elements put together.
In a normal year, my team starts work roughly 11 months before the holiday
We plan out the design and the chef and his team start making the gingerbread bricks from scratch each year in July because we don't have enough ovens to bake everything at the same time — it has to be done in batches and stored in the freezer.
Everything is made, mixed, and baked on site at the Fairmont San Francisco's pastry kitchen. We use ovens and the walk-in freezers.
All of the pieces on the gingerbread house are edible — it's made with actual gingerbread and icing and there's no glue or plaster used. This means sometimes we have problems with guests who have an especially strong sweet tooth. Each night, our on-site "elves" go around (usually after The Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar closes) to make minor repairs and replace any missing candy.
It takes 2 full days to construct the frame and put it together in the lobby of the hotel
Once that's done, we start bringing in the culinary team to put the gingerbread bricks on the outside.
Inside, my team is adding the decorations and fixtures like stockings, lights, figurines, and the electronics aspects on the backend to operate the whole setup. There's usually anywhere from five to eight people at a single time putting up the actual bricks. I myself usually have a team of 15 working on lights, design, and decor.
This part takes right up until November 25. It's hectic, but it's a good feeling.
If you walk into the lobby right now, it smells like fresh gingerbread to the point of people coming in and commenting on how wonderful it smells as we're working.
This year, we had a candy-opening party where we sent a message to staff members saying we needed help unwrapping the sweets. We opened hundreds of pounds of candy together, organizing them into buckets. There was a lot of camaraderie — it really brought us closer together as a team.
When it's time to take the house down after Christmas, we recycle the entirety of the frame, which includes doing our absolute best to reuse all the wood, decorations, lighting, and electronics
In between seasons, we store the structure of the house at an off-site storage site.
As part of the sustainability initiatives built into the Fairmont brand, we recycle as much of the house each year as we can and compost perishable goods like gingerbread, frosting, and unwrapped candy.
The gingerbread house really brings an extra sense of magic to the hotel
Locals see the house as a staple to their holiday season. They come by to say, "Hi" and take photos.
And the look of wonder on kids' faces when they see this enormous gingerbread house is heartwarming. I can guarantee there's a chance my own five-year-old — who doesn't have a lot of self-control — might try to take a bite out of the side.
When I have grandkids 20 years from now, I'm going to bring them to the Fairmont San Francisco, point at the gingerbread house, and say, "I built that once." It's going to be a permanent part of my life and a tradition in my family for decades to come.