What happens when you take the kind of lumber usually destined for scaffolding and turn it into a coffee table with built-in fruit bowls? If you're Helsinki-based designer Didi Ng Wing Yin, the answer is one of the more quietly brilliant pieces shown during Milan design week this year.
Ng's latest collection, In Between Wood and Fire, was on display at the prestigious Spazio Rosanna Orlandi, and the standout piece was a coffee table featuring two apple-sized fruit bowls carved directly into its surface. It's the kind of detail that makes you do a double-take - functional, a little unexpected, and genuinely charming.
Humor as a design tool
What makes Ng's work interesting isn't just the craftsmanship - it's the attitude behind it. According to reporting by Dezeen, Ng brings a deliberately humorous approach to his furniture, which helps explain why something as simple as a pair of small bowls embedded in a table surface feels so refreshing. Design can take itself very seriously, and pieces that manage to be both technically considered and a little playful are rarer than you'd think.
The collection sits within Ng's broader ongoing experiments with timber - specifically construction-grade wood, the kind most designers would overlook in favor of more prestigious materials. There's something genuinely interesting about that choice. Construction lumber is utilitarian, unglamorous, and everywhere. Elevating it into furniture that ends up in one of Milan's most talked-about design spaces is a kind of quiet provocation.
Why this matters beyond the design world
For anyone paying attention to where interiors and home design are heading, Ng's approach taps into something bigger. There's a growing appetite for pieces that feel honest about their materials - that don't pretend to be something they're not. A coffee table that started life as construction lumber, and still looks like it knows that about itself, fits neatly into a broader cultural shift away from polish-for-polish's-sake.
It also helps that the work is just genuinely nice to look at. The fruit bowls aren't a gimmick - they're integrated, considered, and sized with enough specificity (apple-sized, notably) that you get the sense Ng thought carefully about what actually lives on a coffee table in a real home.
Milan design week always produces a flood of concepts that feel more like provocation than practicality. Ng's In Between Wood and Fire collection is a welcome reminder that the most interesting design can be both - thoughtful and usable, serious and a little bit fun.
