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.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/feng-354925-shui-home.html
“A window in the front door, “it’s like a hole in your mouth,” she says.”
I wonder what a window in the Back Door signifies?
Think about it.
Got it! Your wife!
Feng Shui, like most superstitions, is an attempt to use mysticism to explain real world phenomenon. The explanations for why something will make you feel uncomfortable or ill at ease in a home are fanciful imaginings, but if a good Feng Shui practitioner tells you that a design feature is a bad idea, in most cases a fair number of people will confirm it, usually with a much simpler and much less specific “I’m not sure why, but I don’t like this house.”
Will we see appraisals start taking into account value hit from a bad number. Would be interesting to run the data and see if 8s have any measurable boost.
Yes, Feng Shui is pure common sense but most clients, asian, especially believe in these nonsense.
Here is a study showing that house numbers do have an impact on apartment prices in Hong Kong:
http://ares.metapress.com/content/f487823523n42231/
And even car licence plate numbers!
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487009001275
I *like* ceiling fans over the bed!
In a not too long ago SD suicide/homicide case on the news I noticed the number on the house where bodies were found is 8808.
“Ceiling fans above beds are bad because they deflect energy away from you,” she said.
Well MY fan pushes the energy downward onto me, multiplying its power ratio 😉
Feng Shui is interesting JtR. Its interesting to see the builders getting into this. I am wondering if there is a strong Asian population in that area, to warrant her services.
What I love about Feng Shui is that these moronically superstitious principles permit me to design my new home in a way that I know will turn off Chinese buyers or others who believe in such hogwash (which is contrary to lots of basic Western architectural principles). And it’s perfectly lawful!
Feng Shui believers avoid address ending in 4 more so than going after 8 ending. In fact, too many 8s in an address is a turn off as well. Thus 8808 should be avoided by the average Joe.
Closer to astrologly than common
sense.
Note to self – ask JtR to install spell-checker!
The only good I take from Feng Shui is that it gives me a better idea on how and where to place my furniture.
:\
“Feng shui consultants also say to avoid hanging a mirror on the wall opposite your bed because it’s thought to promote the intrusion of a third party…”
Explains why swingers have mirrors on their ceiling – it brings them good luck!
How many high-rise buildings in San Diego have a floor numbered 13? I bet not many. We are all slightly irrational in our own way.
Thats the name of the game here, whatever it takes to sell more homes. Since Asian buyers generally have higher income, generally love real estate, this is the perfect segment to go after.
Did you guys go to the Pardee website on the new Serrento Heights development? What kind of models did they use? Almost all Asians.
http://www.easywebonline.com/ewo/RealtorNews.asp?newsid=235
HOUSE DIRECTION: Many Asians believe that the doorway of the house should face the east because that is a lucky direction. Some absolutely do not want a house that faces north since an ancient belief says that the devil lives in the north and if he sees the front of your home every day it reminds him to send bad luck your way. Pakistanis, Middle Eastern and other Muslim followers may also prefer homes that face east since that is the direction of Mecca, the holy city of Islam.
TIP #3: If a client is convinced that they are getting a good deal on a home they may enlarge a side entrance and call that the front of the house. The challenge is selling them on the value of the deal.
My wife, who is asian, insists on having morning sun hit the kitchen window. Let’ see, if a house is supposed to face East then you would need a kitchen window next to the front door–go figure!
My wife is also “Asian”. Her southeast Asian feng shui is about as different from Chinese FS as backwoods kentucky redneck to a London banker. East, West, South, North… they all have their own flavor. In their version of Feng Shui, it cannot face West. Go figure.
In my opinion, Irvine Chinese are a special kind of bizarre. I can only shake my head and roll my eyes. On the other hand, it makes “less desirable” houses “more affordable” to the rest of us.
Chuck
So, if you have an address with a 4 and an 8 in it, do they cancel each other out?
“So, if you have an address with a 4 and an 8 in it, do they cancel each other out?”
Is a $400k house more desirable than an $800k house?