Lexington, KY - Imagine a gorgeous great room - high ceilings, fireplace, wonderful furniture, walls filled with original art - with a view to the deck and the pond beyond. What could be wrong with this picture? There are no people in it.
The home owner, Kay Mangum, called me with a problem. She couldn't figure out why she didn't like to spend time in this room. She would come in, curl up on her comfortable chaise with a good book, fully intending to relax for a while, and far too soon she would be up and out of there. Somehow the room just made her feel restless.
Kay wisely decided to turn to Feng Shui to solve the curious case of her unsociable great room.
Feng Shui Detective's Basic Handbook
The flow and balance of chi, or life force energy, provide many of the clues in Feng Shui. You can think of chi as an actual pool of energy that we are all immersed in. This energy moves through everything, giving life. If this seems too "out there," you can also think of chi as simply a way of expressing how our environment affects us. Doesn't matter. What matters is that improving the flow and balance of chi - however you perceive it - makes a very positive difference.
A Feng Shui detective also works with environmental psychology which posits that, in the environments we create, we're constantly revealing symbolically what we believe about the world. For example, if you believe that life is inherently difficult, your environment will tend to reflect those beliefs. You'll be squeezing past furniture that's too close together and barking your shins on the corner of the coffee table.
When your home keeps reinforcing your beliefs, it's hard to move forward in life. Imagine what it might be like to adjust all those symbolic messages, to free yourself of some of that baggage. A Feng Shui consultation is an intimate process, and a powerful tool for personal transformation.
Examining the Evidence
Chi likes to flow gently like a meandering stream, it doesn't like to be channeled in a straight line so that it moves too quickly and it doesn't take well to being blocked by poor placement of furniture. Yet, like a stream, it needs to have a defined space in which to flow.
Looking at the living room, we see that the furniture is well placed to take advantage of the gentle, circulating motion of chi and spaced to make movement easy. The round table is easy to meander around, with no sharp corners to run into. The area rug separates the part of the great room that is the living room from the part that is the dining room (see photograph on preceding page), giving chi a defined space in which to flow.
All of the above, furnishings, furniture placement and area rug, are just as they were before the Feng Shui consultation. Flow of chi was not the culprit in this case. We need to put balance of chi to the test.
The balance of yin and yang energies is very important. Yin energy is found in places that are dark, damp and cool (like a cave), while yang energy better describes a desert: hot, dry and excessively bright. Yin energy is more quiet and passive; yang energy is active and assertive. While a balance of yin and yang energy is a reasonable goal, it makes sense that we would want a bedroom to be slightly more yin for sleeping and a living room to be more yang, to encourage interaction and conversation.
Most of us wouldn't want to spend a lot of time in a cave or in the desert, and there's a clue as to why Kay didn't want to spend much time in her great room.
In Feng Shui, ceilings are the "heaven" aspect of a room, while floors represent the "earth." High ceilings are very un-cave like, very yang. Further compounding the issue, the hardwood floors were blonde, the color of bleached sand, which did nothing to ground the room. The wall color was a very light cream, with a white ceiling, making for a very bright room.
All the windows treatments were shutters. This level of detail is again very yang. (For example, windows with divisions are more yang; a plate glass window is more empty feeling, more yin.)
Recommendations and Closing Arguments
Our goal was to tone down the yang chi so that the room would be more inviting, less overbearing. Bear in mind that wall colors and fabrics were chosen with Kay in mind. Feng Shui principles can be applied in many different ways, using different colors and styles, so that a solution is always custom fitted to each client. You, your home and your budget are unique.
Here's what we did: