At Work With ... Lee Walker Shepherd, gingerbread house creator

Every year, my two children and I would go to the Williamsburg Inn and enjoy the gingerbread houses in the windows. And I wanted to create something that was not just a prefab kind that didn’t smell like any spices. We wanted to bake one.

But we had a very humid winter here in Virginia and it caved in. It was a mess, and I said, “There’s got to be a better way.” So I searched the Internet to try to find a baking system. I’m a sculptor, and I’d worked in Claymation, and usually you build an armature from within and you build on top, and there wasn’t anything like it. So I created the Gingerhaus kits, and I have a patent pending on the system.

What you do is you bake on these open-faced baking panels. You literally roll the dough, lay it onto the panels and sort of push down so that you’ve anchored it into the panel. You leave the tabs dough-free, you cut everything (like the windows and doors) out, you bake it, you lay it flat and you decorate it. You don’t use royal icing – you just pop it into the armature. Everything comes in the kit … except a little bit of oil and eggs.

It’s delicious. You have more fun decorating than you do trying to figure out how you’re going to teeter it together and glue it. You can light them from within. You can make sugar glass if you really want to go all-out.

So it’s been a lot of fun.

We started in 2006 … and it’s been an adventure. It went from literally just the cardboard structure to creating this kit and sending it off for patent. Now it’s expanded to a children’s book, “Gingerhaus and the Runaway Gingerboy,” as well as the Runaway Gingerboy cookie kit.

Everything is made in the U.S. It’s food-based, so I wanted to make sure it was safe. And primarily it’s done here in Virginia. It’s nice to keep it local.

Carded Graphics up in Staunton produces the armature and all of the paper ingredients that go into the box. Teagle & Little does my instruction booklet in Norfolk. And then everything is collated in Harrisonburg by Friendship Industries. They’re handicapped primarily, and they collate and put everything together, and they’re wonderful. They’re perfectionists. And they ship everything also from that facility.

The kits are doing really well. It’s profitable right now, but we have a lot of product-development costs.

And now Gingerhaus will be expanding. It’s being licensed by a worldwide gift-ware company, and that line will include everything from ceramics to linens, Christmas stockings, cookie jars and Christmas ornaments. That will launch for the gift industry October 2009.

Aside from Gingerhaus, I paint and sculpt, I do children’s books and I’m also a food shooter. I did the most recent Hampton Roads cookbook called “My Mama Made That.” I shot that and then designed it. I was also an art director for Decipher Inc. toys from ’85 to ’89 and then I worked in motion pictures as a production designer. Then I did a lot of graphic design work, including for the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Virginia Air and Space museum.

I owned my own gallery, Indigo Contemporary Art, on Freemason Street around 2003, but I was becoming more of a merchant and not a creative , and I just didn’t like that feeling. I was also away from home too much.

So I brought the studio home and continued to work as a food artist and on my fine art as well. Then around Christmas of 2006 I started this.

So now I’m just here at home, so you’ll see some of my work peppered throughout. I get up about 5:30 a.m., have my coffee, walk the dog, take my kids to school and then spend the afternoon working on the line. Now I’m home, I can cook, I’m in the center of everything.

I like to cook, but I was not much of a baker, really. That was the challenge. But it was neat being able to draw from my experience as an art director in the toy industry years ago to come full circle.

It’s been quite a journey.

As told to Pilot writer Kathy Adams.