gingerbread-work

A really cultivated person is less likely to waste words on mere ornamentation, just as he is less likely to have gingerbread-work on his house.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 Various

On the western side of the road, near the store, were the parsonage and the storekeeper's modern house, which had a French roof and some attempt at decoration, which the long-established Barlow people called gingerbread-work, and regarded with mingled pride and disdain.

Decoration Day 1892

I don't think she is Dutch -- there is too much gilding and gingerbread-work about her quarters for that.

A Middy of the King A Romance of the Old British Navy Harry Collingwood 1886

On the western side of the road, near the store, were the parsonage and the storekeeper's modern house, which had a French roof and some attempt at decoration, which the long-established Barlow people called gingerbread-work, and regarded with mingled pride and disdain.

A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches Sarah Orne Jewett 1879

Toronto late in November, in the Great Britain, a steamer capable of holding a thousand men with ease, and during this voyage of thirty-six miles we often wished ourselves anywhere else: the engine, at least one of them, got deranged; the sea was running mountains high; the cargo on deck was washed overboard; gingerbread-work, as the sailors call the ornamental parts of a vessel, went to smash; and, if the remaining engine had failed in getting us under the shelter of the windward shore, it would have been pretty much with us as it was with the poor fellow who went down into one of the deepest shafts of a Swedish mine.

Canada and the Canadians Volume I Richard Henry Bonnycastle 1819