The Tamesis
“As a Scottish brand, Burns Night is very personal to us,” says Leeanne Hundleby. Leeanne Hundleby co-founded luxury leather goods brand Strathberry in 2013 with her husband Guy. “It’s a celebration of who we are – a celebration of culture, storytelling and the friendships that are formed and strengthened around the table.”
Burns Night is an annual celebration held in memory of Robert “Rabbi” Burns, Scotland’s national poet in the second half of the 18th century. It’s a joyous holiday that “always falls on Burns’ birthday, January 25, and is the occasion of many formal and informal ‘Burns Suppers’ in Scotland and around the world,” noted Patricia Allerston, director of European and Scottish art and chief curator of the National Galleries of Scotland. As for how Did you celebrate? “Main components of it include the Burns Supper, a meal of haggis, neeps and tortillas, and the highlight of the evening is the haggis speech, served with whiskey toast,” adds Kirsty Hassard, senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee.
Celebrating Burns is one of Leanne’s most cherished winter traditions, which is why earlier this week she and Guy decided to open their home to old and new friends of the brand for a modern Burns dinner.
The evening began with our driver taking us through the cobbled streets of Bruntsfield, the leafy neighborhood on the south side of Edinburgh that the Handelby family calls home. (In typical Scottish fashion, water droplets sprayed against the windscreen, a moody aftermath of the day’s violent storm.) I huddled with several of the evening’s guests, including Louise Roe, founder of homewares brand Sharland England, and Scottish actor Honor Swinton Byrne—whom I’d met earlier in the day, wielding hammers and mallets, and learning how to repair leather goods at the Strathberry studio.
After arriving at this 19th-century cottage-style villa, a group of us followed the sound of bagpipes cutting through the mist as we walked through the red sandstone walled garden. I must admit, hearing these chords unlocked a nostalgia for Scotland that I’ve had since the day I moved back to New York from Edinburgh seven months ago. Although my time away made me commit a weather faux pas (I straightened my hair before dinner), even that didn’t stop me from standing in the rain without an umbrella and listening to the bagpiper finish his stirring rendition of “Scottish Wha Hae.”
The pipe was played by none other than 17-year-old Egan Hundleby, the teenage son of Strathberry’s co-founder who studied playing at Merchiston Castle School. (Rumor has it that someone may have offered a cash bribe to get Egan to perform for us that night, and the bribe had to have grown as the weather worsened. If so, it was worth every penny.)
