What is the best and most object oriented way to do queries on a mysql server?

An application need to do some access to a mySQL database. The tables has many columns, so it would be ideal to be able to get a row, in the form of an object, to be able to read/ write the object (something like row->username) and then update that row.

What is the best way to do this, and more generally, to design this kind of application?

For now, I just have a php file in a server, and I'm ashamed to do a new query for every column I need.