“As a Scottish brand, Burns Night is deeply personal to us,” said Leeanne Hundleby, who founded luxury leather goods brand Strathberry with her husband, Guy, in 2013. “It’s a celebration of who we are—of culture, storytelling, and friendships that are formed and strengthened around the table.”
Burns Night is an annual celebration of the Scottish national poet Robert “Rabbie” Burns, who lived during the second half of the 18th century. It’s a convivial holiday that “always falls on Burns’s birthday, January 25, and is an occasion for many formal and informal ‘Burns suppers,’ in Scotland and throughout the world,” notes Patricia Allerston, head of European and Scottish art and chief curator at the National Galleries of Scotland. As for how it’s celebrated? “Its main components include the Burns Supper, a meal consisting of haggis, neeps, and tatties, and the focal point of the evening is the Address to a Haggis—accompanied by a whisky toast,” adds Kirsty Hassard, a senior curator at the V&A Dundee.
Celebrating Burns is one of Leeanne’s most cherished winter traditions—which is why, earlier this week, she and Guy decided to open their family home to friends of the brand, new and old, to partake in a contemporary spin on a Burns supper.
The evening began with a driver zipping us across the cobbled streets of Bruntsfield, the leafy neighborhood on the Southern side of Edinburgh that the Hundlebys call home. (In typical Scottish fashion, droplets were sprayed across the windshield, the moody aftermath of the day’s fierce storm.) I was bundled in with a few of the evening’s guests, including Louise Roe, founder of the homewares brand Sharland England, and Scottish actor Honor Swinton Byrne—both of whom I’d met earlier that day, wielding hammers and mallets while learning how to repair leather goods at the Strathberry atelier.
Upon arrival at the 19th-century cottage-style villa, our group followed the sound of the bagpipes cutting through the misty air, stepping through the red sandstone-walled garden. I must admit, hearing the chords unlocked a nostalgia for Scotland that I’ve felt since the day I moved back to New York from Edinburgh seven months ago. And while my time away had caused me to commit a weather faux pas (I had straightened my hair before dinner), even that couldn’t deter me from standing in the rain without an umbrella as the piper finished his stirring rendition of “Scots Wha Hae.”
On the pipes was none other than 17-year-old Egan Hundleby, the teenage son of the Strathberry co-founders, who had learned to play at Merchiston Castle School. (The rumor was that there might have been a cash bribe to get Egan to perform for us that evening, which had to keep increasing as the weather worsened. If so, it was worth every penny.)