The Builder of 20 January 1866 savaged it:[4] The plainest brick warehouse in town is infinitely superior as a building to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles in Water Street termed Oriel Chambers.

John Wellborn Root studied in Liverpool as a teenaged boy, having been sent there by his father to be safe from the American Civil War following the Atlanta Campaign (1864).

In all likelihood, he studied the then-brand-new Oriel Chambers and put the lessons learned to good use when he developed into an important architect of the Chicago School of Architecture, exporting Ellis's ideas across the Atlantic Ocean.

Ellis's method for cladding was, however, not adopted by Burnham and Root: their Monadnock Building of 1891 has its distinctive bay windows still set in load-bearing brickwork.

Nikolaus Pevsner called it "one of the most remarkable buildings of its date in Europe"[6] and in his earlier book, Pioneers of Modern Design, describes it thus:[7] The delicacy of the ironwork in the plate-glass oriel windows and the curtain walling at the back with the vertical supports retracted yet visible from outside is almost unbelievably ahead of its time.Architect Adam Caruso (born 1962) describes Oriel Chambers in near-poetic words:[2] Its membranous windows are almost an expression of the open space of the interior pressing out into the space of the street.Today the building looks a little different, combining its period architecture with a 1950s extension added after German aerial bombing destroyed a small section during the Second World War.