Kim Ren: Lawyer, Engineer and Designer

At Il Palmerino, Canadian artist Kim Ren is not seen as an engineer or a lawyer –but as a designer. Her time in Florence allowed her to fully embrace a lifelong facet of her identity that has accompanied her since childhood. 

As a child, Kim found delight in making things with her hands—her earliest memory of this being the

afternoon she stitched a dining table cushion under her mother’s guidance. The joy of that small creation lingered with her, and she soon discovered that working with textiles was like learning another language, one through which she could express an inescapable creativity. Later, drawn both by her own fascination with problem-solving and by her parents’ encouragement, she immersed herself first in the rigor of engineering at the University of Toronto, and later in law at McGill University. Each path was not a detour from her creativity but another way of exploring the fusion of structure, logic, and imagination.

Ironically, it was in the structured world of law that Kim found the time to wander back to her artistic roots. She began teaching herself new fibre techniques until the rhythm of the stitches became a kind of meditation. Some days she would knit for 16 hours, producing and perfecting, simultaneously. What began as a pastime soon revealed itself as something deeper: for Kim, designing knitwear is both craft and homecoming. 

Kim never passed through the doors of an art school, and she counts that as a gift. Free from the weight of academic pedagogy, her process moves to its own rhythm, unbound and instinctive. Inspiration arrives in unexpected places— fine English gardens, the fleeting palette of the evening sky, the dress of a Sevillian Flamenco dancer. More than anything around her, Kim is led by vivid visions of color that erupt in her mind—combinations so striking she is compelled to bring them into life through her designs. For Kim, “selecting colors is an art in itself.”  “I try not to over-intellectualize,” she explains. “I strip ideas down to whatever gives me inexplicable and intangible joy.” 

Kim feels a special connection to Italy for the way that fashion is a commitment and a pursuit, not an option. She aspires to designers like Roberto Cavalli, for his flamboyant and untamed patterns, and Missoni, whose knitwear was iconic and innovative. She is moved by Italy’s reverence for craft – for the patient hands that shape beauty into being.  A prime example of this being the ‘cenciaiolo’ or traditional textile recycling craftspeople that Kim learned about through her time working in the nearby textile hub of Prato.

At Palmerino, community was everything. For the first time, she was among artists, sharing stories, learning their paths, and weaving herself into a creative world. A world that was enabled by the visionaries of Palmerino, Federica and Viola, similar to the world of the previous owner, Vernon Lee, and other notable Florentine creative forces like Anna Banti and Roberto Longhi of Villa Bardini. After Palmerino, Kim wants to build the kind of artistic life she tasted here: a dedicated studio space, a thought-provoking community, and producing fewer but more experimental works. 

Kim’s time at Palmerino helped her conceive new paths forward for her design journey wherein it is given central focus in her life, a dialogue between imagination and expansion, and a celebration of the crafting pulse that has always fulfilled her.  By: Lucie Vittoz