At home with the founder of Honest Burgers in a lochside cabin on Scotland's west coast
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.
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 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.
After university, Connie moved to London in 2011 to work for design consultancy DN&co, where she remained for four years. Tom was initially reluctant to move to the capital, but it quickly became an appealing prospect after he and Philip met Dorian Waite, a hospitality adviser, who became Honest Burger’s third co-founder. The trio embarked on a mission to open a restaurant in London serving burgers made from carefully sourced British ingredients. Friends of Connie’s suggested Brixton Village indoor market – at the time an emerging location on the city’s food scene – and soon unit 12 was theirs.
With £7,500 in the bank, they set about turning the shoebox of a space into a restaurant. Connie offered strong behind-the-scenes support, not only providing reassurance to Tom but also doing all the branding and signage. ‘We were just living and breathing it,’ recalls Connie, who continues to guide the burger chain’s creative direction today. Tom’s stepfather built much of the furniture, while a stash of Ercol school chairs were bought at an auction in Somerset. ‘That bit was a terrible idea, as most of them broke – with customers on,’ Tom adds, laughing.
Thankfully, the restaurant itself was more robust. In The Observer in 2011, its food critic Jay Rayner described Honest’s chips as the ‘edible equivalent of crystal meth’, while punters queued for two-and-a-half hours to sample their meaty patties topped with lashings of homemade onion relish. Quality, sustainably sourced ingredients were key, so every day Tom would cycle to the Ginger Pig in Marylebone to collect 35-day aged beef and bacon. Brixton was outside the butchers’ delivery area, but Tom was absolutely not going to let a 10-mile round trip carrying 22 kilos of meat on his back deter him.
Fast forward 12 years and there are now 44 Honest Burgers restaurants spread not just across the capital but also further afield in cities including Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool. ‘The best thing about opening a business when you’re 25 is that you have the arrogance of youth on your side,’ Tom admits. ‘It just snowballed, especially after we had our first big investment in 2015.’ This was also the year when Tom and Connie bought their first home together – a light-filled Victorian cottage with a wonderful garden, a short stroll from Ruskin Park in south-east London.
‘It was the only place we looked at,’ recalls Connie. ‘I fell in love with the old mulberry tree in the garden.’ Equally appealing was the fact that the house had been renovated by its previous architect owner to combine the Victorian features with a contemporary, clean-lined rear extension.
Connie set up Studio Connie in 2013 and counts Ben Pentreath, Cutter Brooks and Cloth House among her clients. One of her recent jobs has been the branding of Honest Farming, Tom’s new initiative to make Honest Burgers more sustainable. This has involved a complete overhaul of the supply chain, which means they now source beef from a collective of regenerative farmers, whose farming practices are equally beneficial to the environment. ‘It came about because I felt uncomfortable that we’d built a business around quality beef, but I still didn’t know enough about our supply chain,’ explains Tom.
The first farmer that Tom started working with is Ed Walters, who has a beef farm just outside Reading. ‘He is phasing out pesticides and using mob grazing to keep the cows outside for 30 to 40 per cent longer,’ says Tom. The plan is to get more farmers on board. ‘The farms have to show that they are improving year on year, whether that be through carbon sequestration, dung beetle counts, soil health or biodiversity,’ he continues. Many of Honest Burgers’ London restaurants now get their beef from these farms, and the plan is to roll it out to the rest of the Honest family by 2024. ‘It’s so easy to be virtuous about sustainability today, but I’m determined to address these issues head on,’ says Tom. We don’t doubt him one bit.
Honest Burgers: honestburgers.co.uk | Studio Connie: studioconnie.com | To see more of their London house, visit houseand garden.co.uk/gallery/tom-and-connie-barton-london-house
Owen Gale1/17Connie relaxes in the living space, where a four-leaf clover wall panel by Alexander Girard reminds the couple of their good fortune in finding the cabin.
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Owen Gale3/17The couple in the cabin with their dog Gelert.
Owen Gale4/17The couple found the cabin’s 19th-century Swedish green cabinet on Vinterior.
Owen Gale5/17Connie at work in the cabin.
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Owen Gale7/17Tom and Connie with Gelert in one of their favourite spots near their cabin on the remote west coast of Scotland.
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Owen Gale9/17Tom enjoys cooking simple fare over a fire on the beach.
Owen Gale10/17Tom with a tray of crisp baked potatoes
Owen Gale11/17Tom, Connie and Gelert in their London garden.
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Owen Gale13/17Connie, Nuala Durrant and Tom outside the first Honest Burgers restaurant in Brixton Village indoor market, where its chunky beef burgers and signature rosemary salted chips soon had punters queueing for a table.
Owen Gale14/17Signature rosemary salted chips.
Owen Gale15/17Chunky beef burgers.
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Owen Gale17/17The couple with Gelert at the farm near Reading owned by Ed Walters, one of the suppliers of quality beef for Honest Burgers whose farming practices are beneficial to the environment.
