Earlier this summer, we joined award-winning filmmaker Richard John Seymour on a visit to the Alcácer do Sal workshop of artist Mircea Anghel.

Anghel moved to the Portuguese countryside in 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, setting up shop inside a sawmill active on the Herdade da Barrosinha estate. Beneath its lofty trusses, the Romanian fabricates bespoke furniture, including his gravity-defying tables, which juxtapose monumental scale with delicate balance, tactility and a reverence for natural materials.

‘The scale of the space is changing my work,’ says Anghel. ‘I’m building things that are generally too big for a normal house, but here everything looks very small.’

A like-minded community has sprung up around the designer over the last two years – creatives who’ve followed in Anghel’s steps by adopting the Portuguese countryside as their home base and inspiration.

Seymour’s exclusive film offers a glimpse of Anghel’s practice against the atmospheric backdrop of the landscape.

Read the full interview with Mircea Anghel in our How I live series.