How to Create a Feng Shui Living Room
This is Part 3 of 5 Microliving posts about feng shui.
The living area of your home is where you spend most of your waking time, whether it is socializing, watching television, or just reading. The ideal feng shui living room should be invigorating enough to keep you happy and energized, while not providing too much mental stimulation as to become distracting. Therefore, this room is one in which the yin and yang elements should be fairly balanced.
- Allow for a free flow of energy from the door to the window. Anything that disrupts the powerful flow of chi from moving from the living room entrance to the windows will negatively impact the entire feel of the room, so you may need to rearrange your furniture to allow energy to access the room freely.
- If you have a fireplace, make it a central element. Fireplaces are a great source of positive energy, so ideally your living room design and decoration should be focused on the hearth.
- Arrange seating so that everyone can see the door. A half-circular design is the best layout to ensure that good flow of chi, and also move seating furniture away from any walls or windows to foster chi flowing all the way around the furniture from all sides.
- Use mirrors strategically. Place mirrors in areas where you can reflect good chi into areas that are dark or unhappy. This is especially effective if you can reflect windows into more enclosed areas of the living room. Never allow a mirror to reflect a bathroom or staircase.
- Hang happy portraits or artwork on the walls. Surround yourself with positive images, particularly happy portraits on the family side of your bagua chart, or flowing water photographs on the north wall of your living room.
Above all else, strive for balance in your living room area. The unobstructed flow of energy is vital for a successful feng shui living room, so do not allow clutter to accumulate anywhere, keep surfaces as clean as possible, and temper yang elements with calmer yin elements. If you make at least a couple of these changes, you will feel the difference immediately.
Read More5 Tips for Incorporating Feng Shui Into Your Bedroom
This is part 2 of 5 Microliving posts about feng shui.
For a restful sleep and a peaceful bedroom, the calm, soothing force of yin energy should dominate your bedroom when you are designing it with feng shui in mind. Yin, the deep, slow energy of sleep and contemplation, will allow you to have rest uninterrupted by the jarring restlessness of yang elements.
The basic philosophy behind feng shui is on the movement of the energetic life force, or chi, throughout a home. Clutter of any sort halts chi and causes it to stagnate, filling a room and your home with negative energy. Those who live in small spaces will understand the difference just a little bit of clutter can make on their mood when they walk into a room. Needless to say, the clean, unobstructed flow of energy is vital for a happy home.
To bring your bedroom into alignment with the core tenets of feng shui, follow these 5 simple tips to get you started in the right direction.
- Remove major yang elements from the bedroom. Sources of rapid energy, these items belong elsewhere in the home, not a bedroom, including televisions, workout equipment, and PCs.
- Have several sources of lighting. Candles provide the most soothing source of light, but warm, glowing lamps and dim overhead lights will work, too.
- Paint the walls peach, beige, or brown. Bedroom walls should be skin colors, according to feng shui, to have a restful sleep and encourage the flow of positive energy.
- Bring in a small yang element for balance. Feng shui emphasizes that a happy life is a balanced one, so add a few red candles or a sexual painting, or another element that encourages yang energy, to your bedroom.
- Position your bed in a corner away from doors. Your bed should never been in direct line with a door, or your bedroom will be continually robbed of life-giving energy as the day progresses. If possible, your bed should also be away from any windows, and accessible from both sides of the bed.
Bring Feng Shui into Your Home: The Basics
This is Part 1 of 5 Microliving posts about feng shui.
An overview: Feng shui is a Chinese frame of mind for organizing and arranging your home in such a way as to best promote the flow of chi, or positive energy. You can really take it as in-depth as you want, from following the main concepts, to bagua room layout charts, to highly accurate Chinese compasses, or luo pan. The basic principle behind feng shui is to achieve a smooth, positive harmony in every room in your home. And whether or not you believe in yin and yang, or the interdependence of the elements, or the importance of geographic poles and directions, you have to admit that feng shui’s end goal is admirable.
The entire basis of the belief in vital harmony lies within yin (black) and yang (white). Yin is the relaxing, dark, restful energy of relaxation and replenishment. Yang is the energy of movement, strength, vibrancy, and passion. Overall, you want a balance of the two halves in your home, but you want more yin energy in the bedroom, for example, and more yang energy in the home office. There are certain colors, objects, and materials associated with each of the energies, so you can actually see the two different emphases, as well as the effects a few feng shui changes can make on your room. However, you should never have only one type of energy in a room; just as you only appreciate light because you have known darkness, you can only experience one half properly in context of the other.
The other main tenet of feng shui is the idea of the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, which bring added depth and complexity to the ideal flow of chi and energy throughout your home. The elements are like tools you can wield to shape your life’s goals and ambitions. To decide which elements to place in your home and where, you use a bagua diagram. Figure out where south is in your home, and mentally align the diagram over your floor plan to determine which areas are ideal for which elements. Attention should be paid to every area on the diagram, but you can choose to focus on regions that reflect desires and problems currently happening in your own life, such as moving a water fountain to the North to promote career advancement. Additionally, some items you are going to have to decide if you need them more in one area or the other, like an object that corresponds to one area on basis of color and another on basis of element. Feng shui is not an exact science, and you will need to make the best design decision depending upon the unique priorities and problems of your own life.
For more on decorating your home feng shui style, check out Barlett Designs and World of Feng Shui.
Read MoreDivide Up Your Space, Japanese – Style
In general, adding more walls to an already small space makes the entire place feel smaller. Sometimes, though, you need to give an area of your apartment or condo the feel of its own room – but only temporarily. Perhaps a niece is coming to visit and you want to give the child her own bedroom, or you have friends coming from out of town and they’ve asked to spend a couple nights with you. You might benefit from a room divider if you’re working on a project of some sort, whether it be a sewing, craft, or home renovation task that doesn’t look very pretty right now, but can be effectively contained in its own area of your home. Enter Japanese screens, stylish solutions for creating a distinct-feeling room in an otherwise open space.
Japanese designers already do many things right (we’ll discuss more feng shui approaches in another post), but Japanese screens are one of my favorites. If you place a light source behind them, they admit a warm, soft glow to the rest of the room, which makes the space appear larger and more airy. The screens are not just functional; they are stylish and classy in and of themselves. With a fan-like shape, they take up very little room when folded up, and can easily be stored flat and upright in the back of a closet. They may be more expensive than a more typical (but ugly) room divider or a curtain on a rod, but you can bring them with you to your next home when you move. The aptly-named Room Divider Store has a website with hundreds of Japanese-style screen dividers that you can purchase online, if you are so inclined. They’re also just nice to look at and to get some ideas for your future room designs!