Village Chef Creates Sweet Smell of Excess

This house is a dentist’s dream.

Made up of some 800 pounds of gingerbread bricks and candy pieces held together with gallons of white icing, the elf-sized cottage in the lobby of a Newbury Park retirement village could give cavities to half the kids in the Conejo Valley.

Visitors to Ventura Estates’ administration building at 915 Estates Drive can smell the ginger and nutmeg wafting off the 8-foot-high building from outside. There’s enough sugar in the lobby’s air to make children noticeably jittery.

“After sitting here awhile, you get used to it,” said Sylvia Scott, Ventura Estates’ receptionist, who has been the cottage’s nearest neighbor since Thanksgiving. “Only one resident has said, ‘I can’t stand the smell.’ ”

The cottage is a creation by the community’s executive chef, Isidro Rodela, 35, of Oxnard. Rodela and his three assistants spent nearly a week baking scores of gingerbread “bricks” and assembling the dwelling on a frame of plywood and two-by-fours.

“It’s edible . . . you could cut off a piece and eat it,” Rodela said.

To keep the curious and the merely hungry from doing just that, Rodela said he bakes extra gingerbread bricks and hands out samples. The extra gingerbread pieces also keep visitors from getting an extra dose of iron from the screws used to hold the bricks onto their wooden supports.

Rodela’s motive for building a gingerbread cottage wasn’t to tempt any modern-day Hansels and Gretels.

“I’ve seen one before and helped a little bit in building it,” Rodela said. “I figured I could do it.”

Rodela said administrators at Ventura Estates suggested he make a small cottage about 15 inches tall, but he persuaded them to think big. All he has to do now is make sure no one eats his house until the end of December, although it may be too late.

“We had all these children for a party here on Tuesday,” Scott said. All the candy canes affixed to one side of the mailbox post had been removed by small hands. Children are not the only ones tempted.

“We had ants coming down the wall and getting on it,” Scott said. “We had to spray the wall and we haven’t seen any since.”