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Eureka, California
One of America's greatest gingerbread masterpieces, the incredibly elaborate Carson Mansion was built in 1882 in Eureka, California, in the heart of the Redwood Kingdom. The home was made especially to display the possibilities of redwood as a building material by Colonel Carson, a redwood tycoon and sawmill owner. This explains the building's jaw-dropping overstatement and profusion of fine carving: it was used purely to drive sales and was never lived in. The mill's far more mundane showroom can be seen at the left, behind the Mansion.
Now owned by a private club, the mansion is a must-see tourist stop in Eureka, which also contains a number of other noteworthy Eastlake and Queen Anne-style Victorian homes, all of them wooden and most of them containing some carving and lathe-turning in the exuberant late 19th-century manner. One of the finest examples is directly across from the Carson, built for Carson's son-in-law, a beautiful peaches-and-cream-painted Queen Anne house simply dripping with carved gables, spandrels, sunbursts, and stained-glass ornamentation. More fabulous redwood architecture can be found in nearby Ferndale--which has an intact Victorian business district--and Arcata, home of Humboldt State University.