Cover Dramatic and restrained dining setting, hovering above is a light fixture designed by Wynn Wynn Ong, inspired by local Filipino “Malakas and Maganda” lore (Photo: Rafael Kryss Rubio)
Dramatic and restrained dining setting, hovering above is a light fixture designed by Wynn Wynn Ong, inspired by local Filipino “Malakas and Maganda” lore (Photo: Rafael Kryss Rubio)
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Jewellery designer, former educator and consummate host, Wynn Wynn Ong brings the same sculptural precision and poetic sensibility she applies to her work into the way she lives at home
There are people who set a table, and there are people who compose one. For celebrated jewellery designer, teacher and lifelong aesthete Wynn Wynn Ong, the act of entertaining is nothing short of storytelling. In her home, a table is never just a table; it is a living archive of memory, heritage and love. Known for her sculptural craftsmanship and devotion to heritage, she approaches a tablescape the way she constructs jewellery: with intention, emotion and a deep understanding that beauty is most powerful when it carries meaning.
In Wynn Wynn’s home, a place where artistry and intimacy coexist with ease, the dining table becomes a canvas of lived memory and lineage. Every gesture is deliberate: heirloom plates beside delicate linens, unpolished foliage brushing the rim of a bowl, a glint of metal or a rustic artefact. Nothing is haphazard; everything is felt. She loves to decorate using organic features like vegetables and produce, or market-found silver and one-of-a-kind pieces scouted from around the globe.
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Above Nature is reflected in the choice of colours that resonate particularly with Southeast Asian design vernacular in Wynn Wynn Ong’s home
Nature is reflected in the choice of colours that resonate particularly with Southeast Asian design vernacular in Wynn Wynn Ong’s home
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“My love language is cooking,” she says simply. “I infuse my joy into the food, the table, the whole experience. I want people to walk in and feel they’ve entered a place made special just for them.” In fact, she goes the extra mile by asking what her guests are craving for dinner or recalling their favourite dish of hers, so that she can recreate it. However, her signature is deliciously layered Burmese cuisine. “My friends always ask for my Burmese dishes,” she says, laughing. “The coconut noodles, the northern recipes, I can do those with my eyes closed.”
Her centrepieces rarely rely on cut flowers anymore. “Flowers die too quickly,” she says with a tinge of sadness. Instead, she turns to foliage, potted plants or most recently, produce. “I love using vegetables and the ingredients that go into the meal. It makes the table feel alive, connected to the food, connected to the season.”
In another setting, she used driftwood gathered at the beach, adorned with tiny jewelled animals sculpted in her workshop. Inspired by nature and organic form, this artist loves to create using found objects. “I like to entertain, and I like to change the setting according to the time of year. Local plants, indigenous materials, things that speak of place. You know what’s available, and as much as possible, something long-lasting. I like to use a lot of the ingredients that went into the food, as part of the table. Or, potted plants, local plants, I prefer not to use the imported flowers, because they’re not indigenous.”
Above A glimpse of the tablescape laid out in Wynn Wynn Ong’s home
A glimpse of the tablescape laid out in Wynn Wynn Ong’s home
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As with jewellery design, her process is both intuitive and meticulously layered. She reminisces of her shelves and cabinets that once housed dozens of plate sets: stoneware, celadon, porcelain, organised by colour and mood. “I’d stand back and say, ‘Today I’m going to use that.’ My style just translates naturally to what I buy.” Some finds emerge from auctions, others from flea markets or obscure shops overseas. A brass spoon from a farm stand might sit beside celadon plates sourced in Thailand decades ago.
Nothing is chosen for trend; everything is chosen for resonance, a refusal to sway with trend. Whilst she occasionally shops with intention, needing something in particular, more often than not, her now beautiful and eclectic collection of tableware stems from items she stumbled upon and fell in love with from her many spectacular travel experiences. In fact, she has even lived around the globe, shaped by a variety of cultures.
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Above Curiouser House orchid ornaments ready to be used in Wynn Wynn Ong’s tablescapes
Curiouser House orchid ornaments ready to be used in Wynn Wynn Ong’s tablescapes
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Her passion for home design actually predates her career in jewellery. Even as a child growing up in Austria, she transformed the space she lived in, raiding her mother’s cabinet of kimonos and saris, turning silk fabrics into makeshift canopies and caves, rearranging furniture in her tiny bedroom. “I always liked to tinker with my environment,” she recalls. Ong beamed with joy as she talked about working on the construction of her beach house or the renovations for her apartment, thrilled with the thought of working with tools and getting her hands dirty. As she raised her children, before she even ever thought of becoming a designer, this creative force would interior design, style the home, set tables, play with architecture and dabble in construction plans, learning each step of the way, fully enamoured and enthralled.
The connection between jewellery-making and home design is clearer than one might expect. “I’ve always loved building, constructing, making things,” she says. “Home renovation came before jewellery.” When she first began designing pieces, it wasn’t for commercial success; it was to express her creative energy. Each piece was painstaking, uncompromising, one-of-a-kind and meant to exist exactly as imagined. That discipline, the builder’s mind, the poet’s touch, courses through every corner of her home. She is unafraid of the unusual: antique chairs reupholstered in unexpected colours, quirky objects (including décor made from a cow’s jawbone), sculptures and nature-inspired textures. The result is not a curated showroom but a living archive of identity, Burmese heritage, European childhood, Filipino roots and an artistic instinct.
Above A handcrafted bowl, the design and patterns are intracately etched by hand, an art that may soon be lost as fewer artisans are able to work using these methods, Wynn Wynn Ong notes
A handcrafted bowl, the design and patterns are intracately etched by hand, an art that may soon be lost as fewer artisans are able to work using these methods, Wynn Wynn Ong notes
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Her parents, intellectual, cosmopolitan, endlessly curious, shaped her worldview and influenced her signature sophisticated, eclectic, funky and ornate style, rooted in anthropology. They filled their home with art, textiles and unusual objects that reflected their life story. They travelled frequently, bringing the family to museums and cities across Europe. “So the Burmese part of me is very important, but I think what someone enters,” she says. “It creates a feeling, something tender, something unforgettable.” She changes each mixture, balancing oils and ratios depending on the type of event she is hosting. “I have maybe, like, eight scents from Diptyque, and I mix and match them. I don’t just do one. I do various ratios of them according to guests.”
This sensory memory is central to her present-day rituals. Scent, for instance, is a signature part of her hosting. She mixes a range of Diptyque fragrances at a time, layering pine with rose, amber with frankincense to develop her own signature. “I want all the senses engaged the moment someone enters,” she says. “It creates a feeling, something tender, something unforgettable.”
She changes each mixture, balancing oils and ratios depending on the type of event she is hosting. “I have maybe eight scents from Diptyque. I mix and match them. I don’t just do one. I do various ratios of them according to guests.”
Above An array of delicious, vibrant fruits and cutlery to be used in Wynn Wynn Ong’s tablescapes
An array of delicious, vibrant fruits and cutlery to be used in Wynn Wynn Ong’s tablescapes
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For Wynn Wynn, hosting is generational and all about hospitality, always with the guests in mind. Christmases are especially magical: felt mice, velvet ribbons, Victorian crackers, and the smell of pies baked from scratch. “For our house, Christmas time has always been super magical, because it really always revolves around the kids, and it’s always got this very nostalgic energy.” The tradition is rooted in her Austrian upbringing, carried now into her own home, and shared with grandchildren who join in decorating the tree on Thanksgiving weekend with a plump, juicy home-cooked turkey to boot. “We had magical Christmases growing up in Austria. To me, Austrians and Germans make the best Christmases. So we grew up with, you know, chocolate mice all over and chocolate Father Nicholas necklaces and velvet too.”
But even without an occasion, the table reflects the season, cymbidiums when available, produce when abundant, textures that mirror the natural world she reveres. Not only design, but her menus also shift depending on the occasion and the guests. Cooking, like design, is both instinctive and deeply personal. But, it’s this instinct: part hospitality, part craftsmanship, that bridges her worlds of jewellery, objects, and home.
The same sensibility that shaped her award-winning sculptural pieces now permeates her approach to living and hosting: textured, layered, soulful. In Wynn Wynn Ong’s world, beauty is not ornamental; it is relational. It connects the past to the present, the maker to the guest, and the table to the stories shared around it. Her home, like her jewellery, is a landscape of textures and memories, a testament to living graciously and creatively. Design, for her, is never solely for performance; it is a piece of herself, love made visible. And the table, set with vegetables or driftwood, perfumed with pine and amber, lit by candles and bursting with laughter, is where all these layers come together.
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Credits
Photography: Rafael Kryss Rubio
