Tessa Kennedy

Tessa Georgina Kennedy (born 6 December 1938) is a British interior designer, whose clients include multi-national corporations, royalty, celebrities, and European hotels, restaurants, and clubs. Her elopement with society portrait painter Dominick Elwes made headlines in 1957. Early life Kennedy was born in Guildford, Surrey, one of three daughters of Osijek-born Daška Ivanović (1915–2004), and her first husband Geoffrey Alexander Farrer Kennedy (1908–1996). She is a niece of diplomat and former Yugoslav shipping magnate Vane Ivanović and great-great-niece of Dušan Popović, one of the founders of Yugoslavia. She is a great-granddaughter of the British engineer, Sir Alexander Blackie Kennedy and granddaughter of Sir John MacFarlane Kennedy, as well as of industrialist Ivan Rikard Ivanović. Her mother was of Croatian Jewish and Serbian descent. After her parents' divorce in 1949, her mother remarried, to Neil McLean. Kennedy attended The Downs School from 1949 to 1952, then completed her grade school studies at the Oak Hall in Haslemere from 1952 to 1957. She studied at École des Beaux-Arts sometime in 1957. Marriage At age 18, Kennedy became a cause célèbre after she eloped with the painter Dominick Elwes.