Hugo Burge, digital entrepreneur who won an award for his restoration work on a Scottish mansion – obituary

Hugo Burge, who has died suddenly aged 51, made a fortune in the online travel sector and later, with his father, devoted his energies and money to restoring Marchmont House, a 76-room Palladian mansion near Greenlaw in the Borders region of Scotland, winning a Historic Houses/Sotheby’s restoration award in 2018.

An only child, Hugo Aylesford Burge was born in London on April 6 1972 to Oliver Burge, a farmer and founder of Aylesford International estate agents, and Linda, née Henry. His paternal grandfather was James Burge QC, who defended Stephen Ward in the Profumo trial.

Hugo’s parents separated when he was young and he lived with his mother in a modest house in Fulham below the flight path to Heathrow. He recalled as a child pretending to be an air traffic controller and winning a 50p art prize, aged five, for a picture of a space ship sailing through the universe.

From Bedales, Burge read geography at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After graduating in the mid-1990s he and a friend established a web design partnership. Then in 2000, with David Soskin, a banker friend, Burge bought the travel website Cheapflights.com from its founder, John Hatt.

He went on to expand the business internationally, becoming its chief executive in 2011 and brokering its acquisition of Momondo, the Danish travel platform, before eventually selling the whole enterprise for more than £400 million to Booking.com in 2017.

He and Soskin then co-founded Howzat Media, a fund for digital investing, and he went on to become chairman of Motorway.co.uk, the marketplace for selling cars, though by this time Marchmont House had become the focus of most of his energies.

Burge never expected to be running a stately home; as a businessman he lived in a house in Victoria in central London. But in the late 1980s his father, Oliver, had bought 3,000 acres of the Marchmont estate (to which he would add a further 2,500 acres in 2007), and in 2005 the chance arose to acquire the Grade A-listed house, too.

The mansion, designed by the architect James Gibbs and built in 1750 by Hugh Hume-Campbell, 3rd Earl of Marchmont, is one of Scotland’s most important but least known country houses, boasting some of the finest Georgian and Arts & Crafts interiors in Scotland. Since the 1980s it had been owned by the Sue Ryder Foundation and run as a care home.

Father and son decided to take it on, and while his father mainly concentrated on the farming side of the enterprise, Hugo devoted himself to ridding the house of its institutional drabness and transforming it into a contemporary country house.

Over the next eight years he oversaw the restoration of the Georgian state rooms, old kitchen, meeting rooms, apartments and estate offices, and went on a spending spree for an eclectic range of top-quality furniture, paintings and objets d’art appropriate to the different periods of the rooms to fill the huge 50,000 sq ft interior.

“To gain a sense of the scale,” wrote Eleanor Doughty in 2018, “the house has 14 chimney stacks, 76 rooms, 38 walk-in cupboards and 32 loos. There are 188 internal doors (four of which are hidden), if you count double doors as two, as well as 32 exterior doors, 197 windows and eight roof lights.”

The restoration involved adding 15 tons of new steel beams and 20,000 engineering bricks, relocating a chimney piece, overhauling eight miles of wiring, adding friezes to doors, panelling to walls and installing stone floors; 2,500 litres of paint were used on walls and woodwork in 100 different colours.

Burge’s great passion was for the Arts & Crafts movement, and he filled the attic floor (where he himself had a flat) with outstanding pieces by Ernest Gimson, Sidney Barnsley, Gordon Russell and Robert Lorimer.

To help towards the running costs, some parts of the house were made available for short-term rentals and entertaining, but Burge resisted joining the weddings bandwagon (“I want to be able to sleep at night,” he explained).

Instead he set out to turn Marchmont into “a place for makers and creators”, with the emphasis on employing local craftspeople, including opening a rush-seated chairs workshop and housing a national centre for Scottish gold and silversmiths.

He hosted concerts and exhibitions and was a trustee of Wasps Studios (a provider of art spaces around Scotland) and patron of the Borders Art Fair. In 2019 he established the Marchmont Makers Foundation to fund residencies for writers and artists as well as supporting nearby schools and charities.

In 2016 Marchmont House received a special award for conservation and design in the Scottish Borders Design Awards. When the Burges were awarded the 2018 Historic Houses/Sotheby’s restoration award, Ben Cowell, director-general of Historic Houses, noted their “incredible attention to detail throughout, letting the spirit of the house shine through”. Their contribution, he said, was “the latest chapter in the history of a place that has been loved and nurtured by different owners at different times, each adding something new, interesting and beautiful.”

“I feel humbled by Marchmont but at the same time very keen to tame it,” Burge told the Telegraph in 2019. “I want to make it feel comfortable and cosy, and something that I feel proud of – something that doesn’t make me feel like running away.”

Hugo Burge was unmarried.

Hugo Burge, born April 6 1972, died May 10 2023