Tuynhuys

Tuynhuys
The Tuynhuys is a South African Heritage Site
Location	Cape Town,  South Africa
Built	1790
Architect	Josephus Jones
Architectural style(s)	Cape Dutch

De Tuynhuys (Garden House) is the Cape Town office of the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa.

It has in various guises been associated with the seat of the highest political authority in the land for almost two and a half centuries. The building seemingly had modest beginnings with the earliest known reference to the site being in 1674 when the Dutch East India Company first built a "garden house" to store the tools for the Company's large garden first established by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652. In about 1682, the toolshed was converted into a guesthouse to entertain foreign visitors of the Governor Simon van der Stel.

The building was renovated and enlarged numerous times until 1751 when it was first recorded that the building was being used as a summer residence by the Governor, a custom which the historical record seems to bear out for all the Dutch Governors that century. By 1790 the building was known as The Governor's House in the Company's Gardens ('Het Governiurs Huys in de Compagnies Tuyn') and by this time – as reflected in the drawings of Josephus Jones circa 1790 – the gardens side of the building already had its rococo balusters with its stucco drapes and Greco-Roman sculptures.

From a design perspective, the building, incorporating both Louis XVI-style Neo-classicism and Baroque elements, was influenced by 18th Century Dutch and Dutch East Indies architecture of the time. Similar facades, windows, doors and fanlights can be seen in Colonial buildings built in the same period in places such as Amsterdam and Batavia (modern-day Indonesia).

The plans for the building and the overall design are largely credited to the French architect Louis Michel Thibault (1750- 1815) who studied under Louis XVI's Architect-in-Chief. However, the artistic detail of the outside facades, including the sculptures of the infant Mercury and Poseidon drawn from Greek mythology holding the banner on which the VOC emblem of the Dutch East India Company was emblazoned, are variously attributed to a sculptor Jacobus Leeuwenberg, a Dutchman and sculptor Anton Anreith (1754- 1822), a German, both of whom are known to have worked extensively in the Cape in the last quarter of the 18th Century. Yet it is not as well known that much of the infrastructure of the Cape at this time was built by slaves, including the actual construction of buildings.