Interesting article I found. It makes you think about design in a different way especially if you are ever designing for an asian client.
I worked on this project in the middle east, while leaving in New York. The project was a new college called the American University in Afghanistan. And it turns out that toilets and urinals can not face toward mecca. So this caused us to redesign the floor plans. Our next question was which direction is mecca?
So designing to cultural sensitivities is important to keep in mind.
Excerpted from the ocregister.com:
Ms. Feng Shui walks into a model home in Irvine and glances around the room.
“You want the front door to be solid, not glass,” she says, eyeing the position and color of the door, examining the stairs, checking out the bathroom and inspecting the picture frames.
A window in the front door, “it’s like a hole in your mouth,” she says.
Front doors should be blue (for water) or black (representing career). And it should never be in alignment with the back door because “all the energy goes out the back.”
Stairs should turn sideways to the front, also to keep the home’s energy from rushing outside. A home’s energy, or chi, should linger.
“A home should be a place where you recharge,” she says. “It should be restful.”
Ms. Feng Shui — a.k.a., Hyun Jung “Jessie” Kim of Lake Forest – doesn’t just advise homeowners. Lately, she’s been hired by KB Home to advise its designers on two upcoming developments, Sage at Portola Springs and Garden Hill at Portola Springs.
Many of feng shui’s values are common sense.
For example, both Wong and Kim noted that it’s bad feng shui to place homes at the top of a T intersection, with car lights flooding into a home’s front windows. But that’s just plain bad from any standpoint. Red front doors reflect bad energy for homes at the end of a road or alley that form a T intersection.
Other things are not so obvious.
Kim explained that the sink and the stove top in the kitchen can’t be aligned because water and fire shouldn’t be together.
Also, you don’t want family pictures framed in metal in the family area of the home because metal cuts wood. “That’s considered the destructive cycle,” she explained.
Ceiling fans above beds are bad because they deflect energy away from you, she said.
Feng shui devotees like the number eight in an address – or numbers that add up to eight – because the word for eight sounds like “wealth” in Chinese and is good for money.
If a home has an unlucky address, the address can be “changed” by adding a hidden number or painting an invisible number on the wall using clear paint or the same color paint.
If an address can’t be changed, Wong advises builders to put a less popular model on that lot, saving the most popular models for lots with favorable addresses. It’s likely the lot with the unpopular address will sell to a non-Asian buyer “who doesn’t know it’s a bad number,” she said.
