Cosebelle is a research-based design studio founded in Lisbon in 2022. What began as a playful experiment has grown into a platform for design, production, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Our practice moves across scales and formats - from exhibition design and installations to furniture collaborations and publications - always with an investigative, open-ended approach. We see design as both a tool for research and a way of telling stories. Drawing from literature, pop culture, and personal histories, we explore contemporary conditions in architecture and the city, transforming ideas into tangible outcomes. Collaborative, curious, and playful, we are committed to testing boundaries and crafting clever solutions along the way.
Allegra Zanirato Allegra is an architect and producer leading the design side of Cosebelle. She turns ideas into spaces, exhibitions, and objects, making sure concepts take shape in the real world. With a background in architecture and hands-on production, she moves smoothly between big-picture thinking and precise detail. Driven, inventive, and a little playful, she always finds smart solutions — and insists even the heaviest piece of furniture should have wheels. Rebecca Billi Scholar and conceptual lead, Rebecca is a PhD candidate at Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa. Her research examines the role of architectural exhibitions and the relationship between cultural spaces and the city. With a background in art and architecture research at Leiden University, she brings an academic lens to Cosebelle while seeking accessible and experimental ways of sharing knowledge.
The exhibition "Connections" explores the complex web of relationships that define our contemporary world. Through a multidisciplinary approach, artists examine how digital networks, personal bonds, and cultural exchanges shape our understanding of community and belonging in the 21st century.
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Curator: Becky MacGuire Graphic Design: Ana Luísa Bouza Exhibition Design: Cosebelle Fabrication and Installation: FP Solution Photography: Fabiana Trudu Video: All Stories
The Gingerline of Time
'Gingerbread Open Call' Competition Entry | Hartwig Art Foundation | 2025
While gingerbread as we know it today didn't exist in Mesopotamia, its story begins there. Early ancestors—spiced cakes, honeycakes, and sweet grain breads—were used in rituals, offerings, and daily life. Around 1500 BC in ancient Egypt, honeycakes were even placed in the tombs of pharaohs, alongside writings that mention small pieces of spiced honeybread. Across Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and later Germanic mythologies, honey was seen as a divine gift: able to heal, protect, and give life. From these beginnings, gingerbread evolved: build and rebuild it one bite at a time.
The scale of this gingerbread creation allows you to assemble it on your own, though it becomes far easier (and more fun) with company. And once it's finished, you may find that help is just as welcome when it comes to eating it, especially if you want to enjoy it before it goes stale. Whether you imagine reaching for the heavens like the Mesopotamians, exploring knowledge like the Egyptians and Greeks, or venturing into new worlds like the Romans and Germanic peoples, let their ambition inspire you to aim high, if only to ensure that no piece of gingerbread goes to waste.
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Concept and Design: Cosebelle
Mondo Cosmico
Interior Design | Lisbon | On Going
Mondo Cosmico represents an ongoing exploration of interior design that bridges contemporary aesthetics with cosmic inspiration. The project investigates how spatial design can evoke feelings of wonder and connection to the broader universe, creating environments that serve as both functional spaces and contemplative experiences.
Newitt's exhibition featured a custom structure realised by Cosebelle in collaboration with both artist and curator. This structure served as both a support and a viewing device for the exhibition. Made from rough materials like aluminum frames and polycarbonate, it evokes the aesthetics of data centers, guiding visitors to explore the gallery's second space.
Artist: James Newitt Curator: Mattia Tosti Structure Production and Design: Cosebelle Fabrication and Installation: Bruno Gonçalves Photography: Bruno Lopes (EGEAC)
Bulrush Collection
Production Development | Lisbon | 2023
Together with design duo Macheia, Cosebelle developed a collection of objects whose primary focus is the relationship between rough materials iron and bulrush. Realised with the expertise of local artisans Manuel Ferreira and Paulo Sousa, the project is funded on the collaboration between traditional techniques and contemporary design, bringing together creativity and history through the actors involved.
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Design: Macheia Production Development: Cosebelle Fabrication (metal parts): Paulo Sousa Bulrush Artisan: Manuel Ferreira Incubator: Co/rizom Photography: Sanda Vuckovic
Skin of the Earth
Art Production | Colectivo Amarelo, Lisbon | 2024
Skin of the Earth marked Loyola's first solo exhibition debuting two new installations produced by Cosebelle. The exhibition reflected on how we create languages and interact with the world through photographic experimentation, photo-objects, and installations.
Artist: Nat Loyola Curator: Sofia Steinvorth Development and Production: Cosebelle Fabrication and Installation: FP Solution Photography: Francisco Baccaro
Things People Do In Public Space
'Open House Zürich, 2022 Open Call' Competition Entry | Lechbinska Art Gallery, Zurich | 2022
What is a public space? It is open, free, and accessible to everyone. It is made up of different elements and characters that define it as such but, above all, it is its usage and human appropriation that sets it apart. In this context, public space is understood as the outcome of the co-presence of several spatial categories aimed at ensuring a specific ideal, iconic, and behavioural tone to the use of streets and squares.
Behind closed doors: The role of cultural spaces Nowadays, the relationship between public and private space is more unbalanced than ever, due to the outcomes of unregulated gentrification and the disparity between city dwellers. Cultural institutions hold a delicate position in this debate: theoretically open to everyone, they have over time gained an ever more elite character in the public eye. They are open to everyone, but does everyone feel allowed in? Are they truly accessible?
Proposal "Things People Do in A Public Space" aims to open all these doors: more so, it aims to completely take them away. What would happen behind "closed doors" then becomes a continuous conversation with the urban environment. Open to everyone, accessible, free and inclusive, as every public space should be. The proposal identifies the barriers that limit public engagement in the gallery space in all those architectonic and urban elements that hinder visual and physical movement, or thought.
Concept and Design: Cosebelle
Lisbon Archipelago
Honorary Mention, LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture | Lisbon, Portugal | 2022
Water, as a fluid, is conventionally associated with continuity but it often brings about images of interruptions between cities, lands, or catastrophes such as rising seas... But after all, are rising seas necessarily only a terrible cataclysm? Is there a positive twist to be found?
Lisbon Archipelago is an attempt to answer this question. Due to the ocean rise, the Portuguese capital is suddenly submerged by water. All of a sudden and for the second time after the earthquake that took down the lower area of the city, Lisbon goes back to its original and most resilient configuration, with the seven oldest hills of the city left as the only inhabitable land.
By its own nature, a hill is a form of interruption to the continuity of a territory. The disrupting act of flooding destroys the system of connections that define Lisbon nowadays but introduces a new concept of uniformity. The ocean is homogeneous, it's continuous, it separates and unifies at the same time. You can't drive in Lisbon anymore, but you can swim and you can sail and explore alternative and more sustainable circulation routes and means. Tourism and the ordinary city noise have been replaced by the sound of waves, singing birds, peaceful calm, and a slower pace. Humans are not the only inhabitants nor the owners of the city, they now share it with new "dwellers": fish, whales and seabirds, and underwater plants.
The many bridges located on the course of the Ebro river create a system of connections and linkages that tell the own history of the La Rioja area. They have been crossed by pilgrims and merchants, Romans and Carthaginians, tracing the past and connecting it to the present. As always, water brings life and allows for the flourishing of civilization and production. The stretches of vineyards that trail the river flow are a valuable and tangible reflection of the river's prominence.
The proposed installation, Guado recognizes the bridges on the Ebro as the footsteps of everyone that ever came through the territory and aims to locate itself as sequential to those, adding yet another layer in a system of physical connections already present on site. Unlike its precedents, it aims to give importance to the act of connecting visually above the physical ones, highlighting the natural beauty of nature as well as the human interventions that coexist in harmony.
A "Guado" is a spot where the water is low enough to allow one to get to the other side, the proposal does something analog, by letting the users bridge the division between the vineyards, the landscape, and the sky. It picks from the history of the area to add another layer of meaning and it's an enabler of potential associations. The look-outs into three directions facilitate a personal connection with the view, detaching momentarily from the every day to establish a one-on-one relationship with the context.
Concept and Design: Cosebelle
Urban Myths and Digital Fairy Tales
Research | Multiple | On Going
Urban Myths and Digital Fairy Tales explores the intersection between traditional storytelling and contemporary digital culture. This ongoing research investigates how ancient narratives adapt and transform in our connected world.
