Designer Osanna Visconti creates magic via the lost

A curious mix of art, objects, and furniture is caressed by a warm light. Classical music plays in the background, in a space that feels not just like a studio, but also a home. Upon stepping inside this intimate atelier nestled in Via Santa Marta 13 in Milan, you’ll find designer Osanna Visconti sitting on her workbench, surrounded by endless tools and wax sheets that she delicately shapes by hand. Using natural bronze as her key material, she works with the ancient lost-wax casting process, a crafting tradition dipped in history.

Visconti is a designer and an artisan with a passion for collecting natural elements and transforming them into cast-bronze furniture and objects. She studied at the Accademia della Moda e del Gioiello in Rome—where she grew up— and later found herself at the Gemological Institute of America in New York. “I then returned to Rome and discovered the cera persa (lost-wax) casting process in a basement workshop—it was love at first sight,” she recalls.

From tables to upholstered stools, chandeliers, mirrors, bookshelves, room dividers, and tableware fused with real leaves, petals, and flowers—Visconti harmoniously weaves together tactile, evocative details. She warms and delicately hand-sculpts the wax sheets into a mould, the defining element to be cast in natural bronze. “The power and mutability of bronze emits a constant energy to create new forms,” says Visconti, who works closely with craftsmen at nearby casting foundries to create her family of objects.

Nature and its bounty have always been a springboard of inspiration for Visconti. The semi-polished top of the Primavera Table has embossed rose petals and hydrangea leaves—foraged and cast in bronze—while the Alga Candleholder is influenced by algae, specifically seaweed fronds. “In the silence of a walk in the woods, my attention is captured by a leaf, a fallen branch. A gift of nature that I celebrate through my creativity and then freeze in time,” says Visconti, adding, “What I love about my work is the sense of eternity, immortality.”