The colourful houses of Grimsby Beach are one of the things featured in a travel book called The Top 150 Unusual Things to See in Ontario. My dad gave me a copy for my birthday a handful of years ago and we've visited a number of them (but there are many more to go, lol).
Grimsby Beach is now just a neighbourhood in Grimsby, a town of 25-30,000 people on Lake Ontario. They call Grimsby The Gateway to Niagara, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer since you're already on the Niagara peninsula by the time you get to Grimsby! Anyway, now Grimsby Beach is part of Grimsby but it started out as Grimsby Park, a Methodist campground, around 1859. It was all tents at first but the gingerbread cottages started replacing the tents in the earlier half of the 1870s. The history of Grimsby Beach is a little bit complicated with property changing hands and changes having been made by now defunct organisations, but it is a cute and interesting little area. It's subscribed known as Canada's Chautauqua, though it's also been said to have been the prototype for Chautauqua. I don't know what evidence there is of that, but it does predate the famous New York institution by approximately 15 years, so it seems possible in terms of timing.
Many of the gingerbread cottages were destroyed by fire in the early 1900s, but several of them remain and are now year-round residences that are brightly painted and highly decorated.
