6 THINGS WITH TENLIE MOURNING

6 Things with Tenlie Mourning CEO and Founder of Dendwell

Based in New York City, Tenlie is the vision behind @joindendwell. I was lucky enough to interview her for our first conversation surrounding women in the design space. Our shared interests in vintage was just the start of an inspiring chat. Learn more about Tenlie and shop her favorite home decor picks from around the web below.

1. What started it all for you?

My love for interiors and design started with my grandmother who had an incredible, inherent taste for aesthetics. I then moved to New York to study architecture at Columbia and fell in love with the fundamentals of design thinking and process. Yet despite this lifelong education in design, I really struggled to finish and style my first NYC apartment and realized it was so much harder to execute in practice than theory. The combination of my love for accessible design and my desire to make the design more available to a wider range of people through my company, Dendwell. We are building a Saas-enabled curated marketplace for vintage furniture that is dually focused on aggregating the best in vintage decor while also supporting independent vintage dealers with tasks like inventory management and shipping & logistics.

2. What drives your creative spark?

Creating an experience is what I am most passionate about. Creating experience through space is what drove my interest in architecture. Now creating an incredible shopping experience for our buyers and a transformative business management experience for our sellers is what drives me.

3. Most treasured home decor item?

Though it's not a design object, I have saved and dried every bouquet of flowers my partner has given to me over the course of our relationship and since I am not a plant person, we have dried flowers all over our house. As the years go on, it has been incredibly special to have these reminders of the journey of our relationship in the home we are building together.

4. What’s the best advice you've ever received?

As a person who struggles to slow down, the sum of the best advice I have received is "the best way to get to where you are going is slowly." I wish I had a more original quote to share, but I think slowness is the key to unlocking creativity and transformative ideas.