LONDON — The jewelry designer Patcharavipa Bodiratnangkura and Kenzi Harleman, her professional and personal partner, may not wear watches themselves, but that doesn’t keep them from customizing vintage pieces.

Pat, as the 31-year-old calls herself, has always loved adding another dimension to everyday objects. “I used to add Swarovski crystals to my phone case and iPod” as a teenager, she said, sitting at the dining table in the couple’s London apartment.

And Mr. Harleman, 33, has always loved “beautiful, forgotten watches,” as he called them. “In the 1970s they were designed like pieces of jewelry. Now watches are more like statement pieces — ‘Look, I have a 44-millimeter Rolex,’ or, ‘My watch has lots of diamonds.’”

Their creations in both watches and jewelry, however, have what he called the Patcharavipa aesthetic: bold and typically highly textured with organic shapes like beads or other irregularities. While Ms. Bodiratnangkura works in silver, white gold and platinum, her signature is becoming what she calls “Siam gold” — a mix of 18-karat gold and an alloy that is “very yellow, intense and warm,” Mr. Harleman said. And if there are any gemstones in the pieces, they are apt to be big, raw chunks of stone, looking as if they had just been dug up from the earth.

As for their watches, one day in 2016 “we were in a beautiful flea market with secondhand jewelry in Bangkok,” where Ms. Bodiratnangkura grew up, Mr. Harleman said. “We saw a very small 1940s Rolex, 30 millimeter, and decided to buy it and play around with it. It wasn’t even working, and it didn’t have a bracelet.”

So they “gave it a bracelet, with texture, a pattern engraved into the metal,” he said. “It still doesn’t work, because we treat is as a piece of jewelry.”

It led to the first collection of five watches, presented in 2021, then seven more in 2022. They now are working on a set for this spring. But these days, the pair stress, all the watches are completely overhauled and in perfect working condition.

Mr. Harleman finds the timepieces online and during visits to watch fairs, dealers and collectors, many in the United States and Germany. They tend to favor brands such as Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Rolex and Cellini, as those brands have designs they consider refined and simple. Ms. Bodiratnangkura then adds an embellished bezel, creates a new bracelet or reworks an existing one, or she turns the watch into a ring.

Detailing always plays an important role. She might, for example, draw a pattern directly onto a watch case, and then send it to her atelier in Bangkok where her seven goldsmiths, who also work on her jewelry collections, would engrave the design onto the timepiece.

The jewelers work mostly by hand, using the traditional lost wax method to create any new pieces, like a bezel.

The results are one-of-a-kind pieces. The Dover Street Market in London carried her second collection and is planning on introducing the new one this year.

“We have worked with Patcharavipa for many years now, selling her fine and high jewelry collections,” Mimi Hoppen, the store’s director of jewelry, wrote in an email, “and so when she mentioned the development of this very special collection of watches, we, of course, wanted to showcase them at DSM.” Ms. Hoppen reported that everything sold quickly: four watches, with prices ranging from 20,000 pounds to 36,000 pounds (or about $24,000 to $43,200), and three watch rings, from £18,000 to £28,000 (or $21,600 to $33,600).

Mr. Harleman, who met Ms. Bodiratnangkura while he was a retail assistant at the Dover Street Market, knew some stylists and sent them photos of the watches. As a result, Rihanna bought three: a Cellini, a Rolex King Midas and a Rolex Queen Midas. A 2022 photograph of the pregnant singer wearing the customized 1970 Rolex King Midas went viral, “and the rest,” as Ms. Bodiratnangkura said, “is history.”

Her personal history is steeped in design, reaching back through her Thai family and Chinese ancestry. She created her first piece of jewelry when she was 13, inspired by her mother who “used to buy stones in Bangkok or Switzerland or Hong Kong and make her own jewelry,” Ms. Bodiratnangkura explained. “I designed a pair of earrings that looked like cotton candy, with silver wrapped around cubic zirconia.”

She attended high school in England, then earned a diploma from Chelsea College of Arts and a bachelor’s degree in jewelry design from Central St. Martins. She said she learned a valuable lesson there: “You’ve got to know how to lose, not just how to win, because fashion is a very competitive world.” She later studied diamonds at the Gemological Institute of America in New York City and colored stones at the Asian Institute of Gemological Sciences in Bangkok.

Japan has had a profound influence on Ms. Bodiratnangkura, both through her family’s connections over several generations and her many visits with her mother. “If you go to a farmer’s market and buy a melon, they’ll wrap it up like a gift,” she said. She approaches her jewelry and watches the same way.

Elemental to her aesthetic is the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, which the designer defined as a respect for and love of the imperfect.

“Pat always chooses super interesting models, and I love the fact she embraces their vintage qualities whereas some would consider them imperfections,” Ms. Hoppen of Dover Street Market wrote. “Her customizations honor the design yet modernize them.”

Ms. Bodiratnangkura’s first collection of jewelry was introduced in 2016 and the Dover Street Market has carried it ever since. 

Her jewelry also incorporates a wabi-sabi love of imperfections with an appreciation of design traditions. Her 18-karat gold and diamond Piscine hoops, for example, are squiggly circles-inspired, she said, “by the nice lines and curves of French artists in the ’50s like Jean Dubuffet, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger.”

And the Tappeto ring, also in 18-karat gold, “imitates a window frame and is set with a flat-cut ruby, sapphire or emerald,” Ms. Bodiratnangkura said. “It was inspired by the Italian architect group from the ’70s called Superstudio.”

The couple’s apartment in the Maida Vale neighborhood is decorated in sleek black and white shades and reflects their multicultural backgrounds. Mr. Harleman found a lacquered screen of ivory birds on a black background, the same as one in Ms. Bodiratnangkura’s family home in Bangkok; it now serves as their headboard. Shelves on the bedroom wall hold traditional sculptures and tribal masks from Africa. Mr. Harleman’s mother is Algerian; his father, Dutch.

It is in this setting of East-meets-West that Ms. Bodiratnangkura does her designing, and that blended influence shines through.