Louis Michel Thibault trained at the royal academy of architecture in Paris under Ange-Jacques Gabriel, then studied military engineering and took a commission in the Swiss de Meuron regiment, reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1783. He transferred to the Dutch East India Company in 1785 and was appointed its inspector of buildings the following year; until the Company's finances collapsed in 1790 he designed every new public work at the Cape, and private commissions carried him on afterwards. He was the colony's first academically trained architect, and the mannered neoclassicism he brought with him sat deliberately against the curved gables of Cape Dutch building. He worked repeatedly with the Freiburg sculptor Anton Anreith and the Bremen builder Hermann Schutte. Thibault died at the Cape in 1815.
