Hello! This is the second Feng Shui Interior Design lesson, also the sixth lesson of the Master Class. In the last class we learned the three critical elements of Feng Shui interior design – door, bedroom and kitchen. This time we shall learn the principles governing the interior design of other parts of your house/flat. Do you want to know how to design your study room/home office? Where should you pay attention to when designing the toilet? How to decorate the living room? We shall look at these topics in this lesson.
Feng Shui Interior Design – Study Room/Home Office
It is quite common nowadays to have home office in residential units. Many people who work freelance or even full time prefer and have the luxury to work at home. Even not, if you have a kid at home who goes to school, the study room is where you need to put a lot of efforts in when doing Feng Shui interior design for your house/flat.
To fully explain the requirements of a study room/home office, it would take the length of a whole book (in fact I have an e-book in this topic: Feng Shui Office – Your Quick Start Guide). Here we look at the essential elements that all Feng Shui masters consider when looking at the Feng Shui of a study or working place.
The above is a perfect setting of a desk for study or work. Because it conforms with all requirements. In regardless of directions and calculations, this is how an office should look like.
Firstly, there should be a solid backing support. Just like what we studied in the external Feng Shui lesson, it is preferred to have support at the back. The full height solid wall in the figure above meets this requirement. If the back of your seat is not firm and stable, e.g. an aisle, the sign of “flow” and “movement” would affect your career life.
Secondly, the left hand side is higher than the right hand side since the computer / cabinet is on the left. Why is this important? According to Form Feng Shui theory, left means benefactors (support) while right is bad person (challenge). In the past, when people find a location to build a house, they look for places where the mountain on the left is higher than the right.
We re-create the same in the office. The best situation is you have a full-height cabinet on the left hand side of the desk. If not, put the desktop computer or piles of documents on the left hand side of the desk. The ultimate goal is to have a higher-left and lower-right.
It is not difficult to achieve the second requirement, because you usually can decide what to put on your desk. But what if the back of my seating is not a wall? What could I do? Read the paragraph below.
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If there is no wall behind, we can “create” an artificial back support. We can use material, color and quantity to build artificial Feng Shui. Basically you should look for these:
- Material: stone or earth
- Color: yellow or brown
- Quantity: Eight (8)
The first two are quite simple. The last strategy, which many Feng Shui practitioners use, is borrowed from Flying Star Feng Shui because the number 8 is of “earth” characteristic.
When I worked in an office as a summer intern (it was long long time ago…), my seat was in the middle of the office, no wall behind, only an aisle where people walk here and there. It was terrible Feng Shui. What I did was to hang a brown jacket on the back of the chair. It looks like a big brown object is behind my seat. Pretty simple, right?
Some people are a little bit luckier, they have a low-rise cabinet or partition behind. Not a full-height solid wall, but not really bad. In this cast, you can place eight pebbles behind the seat, in this arrangement (six in the middle, one below and one above).
After looking at the desk, we zoom out to look at the whole room.
This setting complies with all the requirements of locating a desk in a room. Not only is there a solid wall backing, there also has a space in front of the desk. Remember we mentioned a similar requirement for a house in the external Feng Shui lesson? Yes, we apply the same principle here.
Another advantage of this design is that you can see the door when sitting while the door does not directly open into the desk. It is very important that the door is not behind you, otherwise, you would be unable to see who’s coming in your room. This is not good from Feng Shui point of view. And since the door does not directly opens into your desk, you would not be hit by the Chi directly.
The third advantage of this setting is the desk is located in a corner. Chi accumulates at corners, so you sit at where there is Chi to support you.
Apply these principles, the following setting is also a good one.
Now you know how to choose a good location to place our desk, right? Simply apply the above criteria, you can put your desk at the best location. Just one final point to make, you should check if there is a beam above your seat. If there is, even if all the above criteria are met this is not good. The beam obstructs the flow of Chi, the person who uses this desk may have personal injury easier. Besides, there may be more restraints and resistance in the workplace or school.
Feng Shui Interior Design for Living Room
The living room should be where we spent quite some time at home everyday. I had a blog post explaining some basic ideas about Feng Shui living room, which could be found here. Let us go through the main points again here.
Firstly, the color of the living room matters, but there is not easy rule to conclude what color must be used in living room and what color must not be. Basically we prefer warm and peaceful colors such as white, beige and yellow, because you would feel comfortable when looking at these colors. However, it is not a hard rule. Some modern interior designers would use bright and sharp colors such as light green and strong red, or very dull colors like black and dark grey. I have a light green wall in my living room but it is not bad Feng Shui. To play safe, using warm colors mentioned above is very acceptable. We shall look at the use of Flying Star Feng Shui to decide on colors in later lessons (Flying Star Feng Shui is a big topic).
We need a balanced placement of the dynamic and static elements in the living room. Examples of dynamic elements are TV, Hi-Fi, ticking clock and anything that moves or produces sound. Static elements are furniture that usually do not move frequently, such as sofa and shelves. One very important point is you do not mix them up. For example, you should not place the TV right next to the sofa (in the opposite is OK). The Yin (static) and Yang (dynamic) must not be co-located. This is why we usually sit at one end of the living room and have all audio-visual systems at the other end.
Mirror is something evil in the living room. Feng Shui masters use mirrors to magnify good Feng Shui, but unless you are very proficient with Feng Shui theories, you should not try this at home, because you may accidentally magnify the bad effects of bad Feng Shui. So my advice is avoid putting mirrors in the living room. If unavoidable, keep the mirror small and preferably cover it up while not in use.
We mentioned in the last lesson that there must be sufficient lighting in the house. This applies to the living room as well. Many Feng Shui masters recommend clients to keep a ceiling light on round the clock if the room is dark. You should consider doing the same if you could hardly read a book in daytime in any corner of the living room.
Finally, the about the location of sofa. Same as the seating in the study room, you should sit at where there is a backing wall behind. Feng Shui principles are universal (for most of the time), once you learn a rule you could apply it everywhere in the house.
Feng Shui Interior Design for Toilet/Bathroom
The toilet/bathroom is considered a dirty place according to Feng Shui principles. We usually put it inside a house at where the Feng Shui is not good (and make sure the good corners are reserved for the door, kitchen and bedroom). Other than that, there are some more rules to follow.
Firstly, toilet is a “water” area, it should not be co-located with the “fire” area, i.e. kitchen. It is quite common in some apartments in Hong Kong (the city where I live) to locate the toilet/bathroom “inside” the kitchen. This may be a result of easier drainage pipe installation. However, to have the water area surrounded by the fire area is a bad idea. If this happens to your house/flat and you cannot change it, make sure you keep the toilet door closed. From hygiene point of view this is not good, not to mention Feng Shui.
Secondly, if the toilet/bathroom is right next to the bedroom, make sure the water closet is not right behind the headboard of the bed, i.e. the bed and water closet should not be next to each other with only a wall separating them.
Thirdly, the toilet/bathroom should not have transparent enclosure. Interestingly it is very common for modern house design to have glass walls because people think it is sexy. However, this is not good from Feng Shui point of view.
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Takeaway Feng Shui
In every lesson I’ll give you a practical Feng Shui tip that you could implement instantly in this “Takeaway Feng Shui”section. This time, I shall teach you some useful Feng Shui skills related to clock.
The first rule about clock is not to put a clock facing a door, no matter entrance door, kitchen door, toilet door or bedroom door, the clock should not be placed directly facing a door. Clock has an effect of radiating negative energy, if you place a clock directly facing a door, negative energy could affect the door and the room where the door opens into.
On the other hand, clock could be used to reduce the bad effects of construction works. If you found that there is construction work outside your house that you can see from inside your window, you can place a clock inside the window with the clock face side pointing to the construction site. According to Feng Shui theories construction work outside a house is usually bad, we can use the clock and the bad energy that it radiates to counter-react against the construction site.
Inside the bedroom there is usually alarm clock. It is normal to have a clock, but beware if the clock is driven by battery, you should not place a big clock inside the bedroom. Since electrical clock belongs to “fire” characteristic, excessive “fire” in bedroom would cause bad health to people who sleep in that room.
On the other hand, clocks of different shapes and materials could bring good health if they are placed properly in the house. Here are the instructions:
- North: Place a circular and metallic clock here for good health for the urinary system
- South: Place a long rectangular and wooden clock here for good health for the heart, blood vessels and skin
- East and Southeast: Place a tidal shape glass clock here for good health for the liver, gall bladder and four limbs
- Northeast and Southwest: Place a triangular or hexagonal plastic clock here for good health for the digestive system
- Northwest: Place a square stone clock here for good health for the stomach and bones
If you need to hang a clock on wall and there are health problems that persist in your family, why not try the above locations?