Soon after Tom and Connie Barton started dating almost 15 years ago, Connie (then Dickson) gave Tom a test: a week in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland. Connie, a graphic designer who is half Scottish, has holidayed in the Highlands since she was a little girl and wanted to be sure that Tom shared a similar love for wild escapes and ‘soggy sandwich’ picnics. ‘I didn’t realise at the time it was all part of some sort of interview process,’ Tom recalls, laughing. Thankfully, after a week of foraging for mussels and fishing off the rocks, he passed with flying colours. And so began two love affairs: the couple married in 2016 and returned to Scotland’s west coast for their honeymoon.
Trips north quickly became as much a necessity as a holiday, providing a tonic to their full-on lives back in London, where they are based with their dog Gelert. At the time of their first Scottish trip in 2011, Tom had just launched Honest Burgers from a 25-cover restaurant in Brixton, which would go on to become a thriving chain. ‘The stress of Honest Burgers began early and Scotland became the only place we could properly switch off,’ says Tom. The pull was so great that, by 2021, they decided to put down formal roots there, buying a log cabin on a farflung peninsula, four hours’ drive north of Glasgow on the west coast. ‘We try to go up for a week every month,’ Tom says. For Connie, who runs her own graphic design studio and can work from just about anywhere, it is ideal.
In the main living space, second-hand furniture, including a vintage Heal’s loveseat, is mixed with a few contemporary pieces. These include an Ilse Crawford hammock, which stretches between picture windows offering spectacular views over Loch Sunart.
Tom led the search for a place up in Scotland. ‘We ended up looking at about 13 different properties,’ Connie recalls. Some were a bit too remote – a particularly memorable viewing involved an hour bumping along in a Land Rover to a cottage on Knoydart, a peninsula widely regarded as Britain’s last wilderness – but this helped the couple refine their criteria. ‘In the end, we decided we wanted to be on the mainland, within a 10-hour train journey or drive from London,’ Connie explains.
What they settled on was a cedar log cabin, with a huge picture window looking over Loch Sunart and substantial Douglas Fir beams supporting it. ‘It was larger than anything else we’d looked at, but unlike the little converted crofters’ cottages we had initially dreamed of, there wasn’t a dehumidifier in sight and the view and sound of the burn running along the side of it won us over,’ Connie says of the cabin, which was built in the Nineties.
The cabin, built in the Nineties from cedar logs, is coated with a Swedish treatment that allows the wood to weather naturally, silvering to blend in with the surrounding larch trees.
The couple collected the keys in April 2021 and set to work making it their own. ‘We woefully underestimated how much work the outside would require,’ admits Tom, who spent a week sandblasting off a gloopy brown paint. Eventually, they coated it with a Swedish treatment that silvered it beautifully, so it now blends in perfectly with the surrounding larch trees. When it came to decorating, Tom turned to online auction site The Saleroom. ‘Almost everything here is second hand, but we bought a few contemporary pieces, which nicely offset some of our more knackered finds,’ Connie says. In the cathedral-like main living space, Jean Prouvé’s ‘Potence’ wall light extends over a floor covered with vintage kilim rugs, a folky antique Swedish bookcase and a vintage Heal’s loveseat.
Tom and Connie met in Brighton, where they were both studying but at different universities; their paths crossed while working in the same restaurant. It was also during a shift at the restaurant that Tom met another kindred spirit: his now business partner Philip Eeles. Though neither were trained chefs, they decided to set up a pop-up burger stand, kitting themselves out with a fryer, grill and marquee, and started serving up chunky beef burgers and their signature rosemary salted chips at local markets and festivals. ‘We called it Honest, because it’s a no-nonsense type of place with great food and great service,’ explains Tom.
