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Feng shui for builders
Homes, rules out of sync
The Miami Herald, Aug. 22, 2002
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/3911456.htm
BY DOUGLAS HANKS III
Pools wrapped around the house bring financial luck; arced the other way, money problems tend to follow. Master bedrooms near the front door lead to break-ups. Spiral staircases amount to twisting trifectas of ill fortune: jinxing income, health and love.
This was the bad news feng shui consultant Grace Parish delivered to local home builders Wednesday in a seminar on employing the Chinese philosophy as a sales tactic.
Believers look for invisible energy patterns when house hunting, Parish explained, and recoil from some of the defining features of South Florida’s cramped suburbs: oddly shaped lots, walk-through kitchens and cul-de-sacs.
”You would have to go into all sorts of cost increases” following feng shui, said Fernando Martinez, a Miami-Dade developer who organized Wednesday’s seminar for the Builders Association of South Florida. But even if feng shui (pronounced fung SHWAY) proves too expensive for tract home marketing, Martinez said enough buyers are interested in it to justify the crash course.
”I understand that in Miami, if you can find a nice building lot, you’re going to take it,” Parish, a 50-year-old Lee County resident, told the 40 people gathered in a hotel banquet room for the presentation. But “you don’t want to lose a sale because of bad feng shui.”
The ancient discipline, somewhere between superstition and religion, emerged as a hot decorating trend about five years ago and was helped along once Oprah Winfrey declared herself a fan. Some decorators say feng shui’s popularity has since slipped, but its complex rules and doctrine still has pull in the local housing market.
Martinez’s employees at Caribe Homes have prowled through their developments in search of homes facing north or east to satisfy a customer’s feng shui requirement. Rival Century Builders issued feng shui textbooks to its sales force to help parry energy-flow concerns. Developers vetted the new Trump hotel and condominiums in Sunny Isles Beach for feng shui problems before marketing them in Asia.
Michael Payne, host of the HGTV channel’s Designing for the Sexes, said some of his interior design clients insist on feng shui rules that make little sense to him, including a bed marooned in the middle of a room so it wouldn’t face a door.
”I find it annoying,” he said of feng shui. “Those that dabbled [in it] have fallen by the wayside.”
Parish’s presentation at the Miami Airport Marriott revealed the challenges of feng shui compliance in South Florida, where relentless growth has left little maneuvering room for spiritual complications.
Feng shui centers on the belief that energy called chi flows through the universe like water, altering its course to fit the setting. The goal, Parish explained, is to regulate the rush of energy into a gentle drift.
Houses at the end of a street — or the cusp of a cul-de-sac — get bombarded by chi, so it’s best to avoid building there. Houses should sit squarely in the center of a lot to promote energy flow, not shoved to one side or the other. And the property needs to be square; triangular lots cause health or career problems; trapezoids can sap finances.
Inside the home, certain rooms create their own worries and opportunities. Stoves generate energy, but too much traffic through the kitchen can disturb that. Better to put kitchens in the back with a single door, Parish says, than to make it the center of activity.
Bathrooms in the middle of the house cause problems, too, since they drain energy. And front doors should never face back doors, since the chi can escape too easily.
”That’s against everything in Florida,” said Tom Murphy Jr., chairman of Coastal Construction Group. The luxury builder said he tries not to block the rear of the house from the front, since that’s where the water view usually sits. “The number one thing is when you open the front door, you went to see right out the back door.”
Though she called it her ”magic pill,” Parish also acknowledged feng shui serves more as an ideal than a blueprint.
”You cannot build a house with perfect feng shui you would ever want to live in. Because you’d have the bedroom over here,” she said, stretching her arms, “and the bathroom over here.”
Parish emphasizes almost all feng shui problems have fixes: crystals to divert chi escape routes, mirrors to compensate for poor energy, bright colors to right misguided room layouts.
”Whether you believe this or not,” she said, ‘people out there are hiring people like me and saying: `Look at this house. Should I buy this house?’ ”
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