Robert Lewis Roumieu

Robert Lewis Roumieu (1814 – 1877) otherwise R.L. Roumieu, was a 19th-century English architect whose designs include Milner Square in Islington and an idiosyncratic vinegar warehouse at 33–35 Eastcheap in the City of London. A pupil of Benjamin Dean Wyatt, he worked in partnership with Alexander Dick Gough between 1836 and 1848.

Roumieu was of Huguenot descent and his middle name is occasionally spelled "Louis". The Roumieu family originated from Languedoc, and the name has been listed among those of Huguenot refugees who settled in Great Britain and Ireland during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1714). Roumieu's father John was a solicitor, while his grandfather Abraham Roumieu (1734–1780) had been an architect.

Roumieu was articled to the architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt in 1831. In 1836 he went into partnership with another pupil of Wyatt, Alexander Dick Gough. Together they completed some notable projects in what are now the London Boroughs of Camden and Islington, including Milner Square and the Islington Literary and Philosophical Institute (now the Almeida Theatre), a stuccoed classical work of 1837. The partnership was dissolved in 1848.

On 15 December 1845 Roumieu was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA), having been proposed by HL Keys, EM Foxhall, and HE Kendall.

For 22 years Roumieu's address was 10 Lancaster Place, Strand, London (1845–77). Prior to that he was at 8 Regent's Square, St Pancras, London (1845) and after that period at 7 St George's Terrace, Regent's Park, London, until his death in 1877.

Roumieu and Gough's Milner Square, Islington, has been taken as "an early example of his [Roumieu's] talent for strangeness and distortion."

In 1868 Roumieu designed 33–35 Eastcheap in the City of London as a vinegar warehouse for Hill & Evans at a cost of £8,170. It has been seen as "crazy and dazzling" and as one of the City of London's most original commercial façades. Ian Nairn characterised it as "truly demoniac, an Edgar Allan Poe of a building", arguing that it should be preserved "not as an oddity, but as a basic part of human temperament, and one which doesn't often get translated into architecture".

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