Feng Shui Basics for Your Home

In an earlier post, we discussed the basics of feng shui for your entrance area and front door. Let’s briefly summarize that information here before we turn to specific tips for your kitchen:

• Feng shui is a Chinese system or philosophy of design centered around creating balance and harmony between five basic elements: water, fire, wood, metal and earth.
• Practitioners place furnishings, art, and other items in a specific room or area of a home using a compass or bagua, based on those five elements.
• The feng shui elements can be seen in both constructive and destructive modes. Water puts out fire (destructive) but helps wood grow (constructive).
• The overarching principle or goal in feng shui is balance and the clear flow of energy throughout your home. So a lot of feng shui work is about removing obstacles to the natural flow of your home’s “chi,” or life energy.

As Inês Martins, a highly-respected Miami-based designer, puts it: “We always start from the client’s own essence … to know them thoroughly, to ensure that every detail, every element, every space, finds a perfect harmony with what they really are or [where] they really want to find themselves.”

That’s also the essence of feng shui.

Why the Kitchen Is Important in Feng Shui

Every room in your home governs a certain area of your life, according to feng shui. For the kitchen, that area is prosperity and wealth.

The kitchen is associated primarily with the energy, sustenance, and abundance we take from food. In feng shui, that literal energy (food into calories consumed to fuel our bodies) also symbolizes the more esoteric energy of financial wealth and abundance.

So the key to good feng shui in your kitchen is protecting the unobstructed flow of that energy of abundance.

In fact, the kitchen is so important in feng shui that it’s considered part of the “feng shui trinity” — the bathroom, the bedroom, and the kitchen. Together, these three rooms form a crucial framework for the health and harmony of the home.

Feng Shui Tips for Your Kitchen

You can ensure a free flow of prosperity through your home by ensuring a more open floor plan for your kitchen and immediately adjacent areas, such as breakfast nooks and dining rooms. Generally speaking, if a person can move easily from one area into another, so can the energy.

Also, if at all possible, avoid having your kitchen open directly into a main point of egress (i.e., front or back door), if you want to keep that energy from flowing out of your home altogether.

Install the best lighting possible. Dark, shadowy corners and harsh, glaring fluorescent lighting are equally damaging to good feng shui and balanced energy flow. Aim for building layers and levels of lighting, depending on the appliances and functions of specific parts of your kitchen.

Although the kitchen is often a place that collects “stuff” — gadgets, electronics, utensils, and lots of cookware — it’s always better from a feng shui perspective to drastically reduce clutter.

There’s no need to go minimalist in your kitchen style, though. Instead, adopt a rigorous approach to organization and storage in this all-important room.

Use smaller containers to organize small items in drawers and cupboards. Invest in beautiful, well-made containers for items that will be visible (i.e., on counter tops, etc.). And avoid the trap of the “clutter drawer”!

Colors should be carefully chosen. Yellow is considered an auspicious choice for kitchens in feng shui, whether that’s the pale, soft shades of butter or a stronger, more vivacious butternut squash.

To more fully invoke the feng shui “abundance and prosperity” energy in your kitchen, add lovely fresh cut flowers in sparkling glass or crystal vases; a vibrant, healthy potted plant on a table or passthrough surface; or a bowl piled high with succulent, fresh fruit on your dining table.

And finally, no matter how large or small it may be, one of the most effective ways to enhance the feng shui of your kitchen is to keep it clean and tidy. Neglected spaces tend to accumulate dead, stagnant energy, whereas well-tended spaces keep that energy flowing smoothly.

One way to go about making sure your front door helps your house to feel more like a home — and maybe even bring a little more positive energy and luck inside — is to follow some basic feng shui principles.

What is Feng Shui?

Feng shui is an ancient Chinese philosophy or doctrine that focuses on balancing dualities such as light and dark. Adherents believe good feng shui leads to a more harmonious, pleasant home and that it can also lead to a more personal success and well-being.

One of the principles of feng shui is the concept of yin and yang. In Chinese philosophy, yin represents the feminine, intuitive energy and yang represents a masculine, logical energy.

A Few Basic Principles of Feng Shui

Feng shui practitioners use a compass or bagua to help design an interior space or element, such as a front door. The bagua helps with the proper placement of items relating to the five various “elements” of feng shui: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth.

Each of these elements can be represented in a constructive or destructive mode. For example, in its destructive form, water extinguishes fire but in its constructive mode, it helps wood (plants) grow. Neither mode is good or bad, according to feng shui principles. They’re both required for a balanced world, home, and life.

Your front door is literally the entrance into your living space and the first impression visitors get of your home. In a sense, it sets your home’s “intention” and gives you an opportunity to express what your home life is all about. It’s also the source of your home’s “chi,” or life energy.

That makes the front door an important focal point in feng shui, and worth a little attention.

Simple Tips to Feng Shui Your Front Door

Start by taking a stranger’s view of your home’s entrance. Stand outside and walk up to your front door, then through it while maintaining as objective a perspective as possible. What feeling does this walk-through leave you with?

Next, clear the clutter. “A place for everything and everything in its place” could very well be a feng shui guideline! If there are any elements there that don’t bring you joy or add to the beauty of your entranceway, either remove them altogether or consider replacing them with more attractive and functional options. Decluttering the area of dead plants, empty containers, and anything unnecessary will help open up the flow of positive energy into your home.

Consider giving your front door a fresh coat of paint, preferably a bright, cheerful color. You might even want to explore the associations specific colors have with feng shui concepts, such as love, money, luck, and more.

By the same token, make any small repairs or cleanup jobs necessary to spruce the door up. Cracked glass, dulled hardware in need of a polish, accumulated dirt and grime can all dam up the flow of good energy, according to feng shui.

Add a tall, healthy plant to your entrance area. Healthy growing plants in general are seen as luck-enhancing in feng shui. Just make sure the plant doesn’t block the entranceway or the path through the door, as anything that hampers energy flow isn’t a good choice!

Finally, add some charm and color to your front door and entrance area with a cheerful new welcome mat and a small statue of a meaningful figure — a guardian angel, perhaps, or a laughing Buddha. Figures such as these bring protection to your home, feng shui experts believe.

Help the good energy continue flowing into your home by cleaning and sprucing up the items and furnishings in your entryway, according to feng shui principles. For example, you can add a small water fountain to the right side of your door if you want to bring in good luck every time the door is opened.

And if you’re looking to incorporate more feng shui into your home, check out our Easy Feng Shui Tips for Your Kitchen.