Government House was built between 1902 and 1906 as the official residence of the governor of the Transvaal Colony. The Cape vernacular style was taken on as a national building style promoted not only by the Cape coteries but also by proponents of Dutch-speaking republican independence or of Afrikaner nationalism, notably the Dutch Pretoria artist Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef. Over the next few decades most public buildings in South Africa were designed with versions of Cape Dutch gables, with fanlights, mullioned windows, and brass escutcheons, to differing degrees of cost and credibility.