The Ultimate Feng Shui Living Room

As a Custom Home Builder and Designer we’re always looking for ways to improve our home designs. Clients routinely ask us questions like, what’s the best way to arrange a kitchen or bathroom, how will the bedroom be laid out or where will all the living room furniture go? That’s what led us to study the ancient practice of Feng Shui. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, Feng Shui seeks to balance the energy in a physical space for the ultimate well being of it’s occupants. Feng Shui empowers you to improve every aspect of your life, from your health and wealth to your relationships and career. Even if your not a believer and have no desire to create the ultimate Feng Shui living room, using these basic principals is sure to boost well being and use your space more efficiently.

Feng shui is a branch of Chinese Medicine that is an art, a science, and a spiritual practice, all rolled into one. It’s purpose is to create balance and harmony in all aspects of life by changing the energy of the spaces we live in. After all, our environment has a profound effect on the way we feel, how we think, what we say, and on our subconscious mind. Everyone’s experienced a person that “woke up on the wrong side of the bed”, as they say. A negative subconscious frame of mind bleeds through to every aspect of your life. Feg Shui creates a balanced space that flows positive energy which makes you feel good. This in turn impacts aspects of life beyond the physical. A clean, balanced home means a better mind, and ultimately, a more peaceful, happier life.

Creating A Feng Shui Living Room

Imagine how you’d behave in the crowded streets of New York City at rush hour. You might walk cautiously, almost agitated, rushed, feeling guarded, your body a bit tense, responding to the others with a sharper tone. The hustle and bustle of a mid town afternoon may be exciting to some, but it’s anything but a relaxed environment.

Contrast that with a day at the beach. You feel relaxed, you go with the flow, feeling happier, thinking clearer, free. Open and friendly to the world with a easy smile and care free attitude.

How would you feel if you lived in a dark, dingy, bug-infested home? What would your attitude be like? How would you interact with others? Conversely, how would you act and feel if you lived in a luxury home with all the amenities you could even dream of?

These are all examples that get at the heart of the Feng Shui philosophy. Your presence and overall well being varies depending on what your environment looks and feels like. There’s little doubt you’d be better off living a life at the beach than in that dark, dingy, bug infested home.

That’s what a Feng Shui is all about. Creating the ultimate Feng Shui living room helps create a positive energy that penetrates all aspects of your life.

The Ultimate Feng Shui Living Room Challenge

Read what we have to say ahead, look at all of our example pics, read the tips and continue learning with other books, articles and videos. Then take what you’ve learned home and create your very own Ultimate Feng Shui Living Room. And when you do send us the pics, we’d love to see what you’ve created and with your permission will post the photos in a gallery at the bottom of the page. Hopefully what you create will inspire others to do the same.

Feng Shui Basics

Three Power Principles of Feng Shui

The Bagua

The Bagua is the chart used to map the areas of a home or office and determine where to locate the objects and colors that represent the Five Elements. The traditional bagua is an octagon (the word bagua means “8-sided” in Chinese). Modern approaches to Feng Shui use a grid-shaped chart to map nine areas of your life but we still use the traditional method. Applying the Bagua to your Feng Shui living room will greatly help in it’s design.

Basic Principles Of A Feng Shui Living Room

The Basic Tools of Feng Shui

A variety of principles are available to you when designing your Feng Shui living room. These principles are especially helpful in unblocking energy and creating good flow in a home or business.

• Color adds emotional, physiological, and cultural content to our lives. We associate certain things with color, such as holidays, cultural events, and emotions. In Feng Shui, color is primarily used to represent and balance the Five Elements.
• Sound is used to connect us to others in our environment. Music is a powerful way to uplift the chi in any environment and can sooth stressful home or office situations.
• Lighting is a simple way to bring more chi into your environment, especially full-spectrum light bulbs that simulate natural light. Fireplaces are also a source of light.
• Art can enhance the chi, whether it is a painting, sculpture, or textile. The selection and placement of art depends on the area of the bagua you need to activate. Art should reflect positive images and feelings.
• Growing Things like healthy plants and flowers connect you with the natural world. They can be chosen for a specific shape and color to correspond to a particular element and area of the bagua. Silk plants can be used where light is too limited to grow healthy plants.
• Water Features such as fountains and aquariums stimulate the movement of chi in and around your home or business.
• Wind Sensitive Objects such as wind chimes, mobiles, whirligigs, banners, flags, and weather vanes attract the chi into your environment.
• Mirrors & Crystals can be used when there are structural flaws or where there is no space for any other “cure.”

The Ultimate Feng Shui Living Room: 7 Easy Steps

There’s more to Feng Shui than just rearranging some furniture. This ancient Chinese practice is all about harnessing the power of natural energy (known as chi) in our lives to bring about added comfort and harmony. When it comes to using Feng Shui in your home, one of the most crucial areas to focus on is the living room.

To achieve Feng Shui in any given room, it’s important to create spaces in which you can exist peacefully with your surroundings.

Luckily, using Feng Shui principles in your home doesn’t have to be challenging. It’s possible to transform your home and maximize your well being – all without breaking the bank or taking too much time out of your day. In this post, we’ll address the top techniques you can use to create the ultimate Feng Shui Living Room.

1. Be Clutter Free

The places you spend the most time have the most impact on your life. Clearing clutter shifts the energy of those spaces from negative to positive. Positive energy results in increased happiness in all aspects of your life.

The reason most people avoid clearing the clutter is because it takes effort and can be time consuming, and almost everyone is pressed for time these days. Clearing clutter can also be an emotional process that can sometimes feels like therapy.

Clutter creates low, stagnant, and confusing energy that constantly drains you and everyone around you. Clutter is stressful and uncomfortable to be around which negatively influences, or even completely blocks, the flow of positive energy in many areas of your life.

Wires are a common source of irritation. If they can be bundled or hidden, they are usually less irritating or not irritating at all.

Why would you keep something you hate? Items you don’t like create negative energy, pure and simple. This creates a negative frame of mind. Negativity attracts more negative things into your life. As long as the disliked items remain so will the stress they cause. Imagine trying to relax in a room with something that’s disturbing to you, it’ll constantly be on your mind. Stop procrastinating and get rid of it.

Once you clear the clutter you’ll start experiencing a heightened sense of relaxation, increased clarity, and less stress. Wouldn’t you agree this is definitely worth the hard work and extra effort it takes to clear your clutter?

Try and keep only the essentials. If you don’t like throwing things out then don’t. Box up your clutter and store it away. If you want to create the Ultimate Feng Shui Living Room then clearing the clutter is the perfect place to start.

2. Increase Flow

The notion of flow is one of the main principles of Feng Shui and must be considered if you really want to create the ultimate Feng Shui Living Room. Chi, another name for Universal energy, has to flow smoothly through your living room so it can be filled with positive energy.

The flow of energy can be visualized similarly to that of water. With this comparison in mind, take a look at your living room arrangement and see if the “water” is flowing effortlessly about your living room. Will it get stuck in some areas? Will it easily escape through a big window without having the chance to encompass your living room?

It’s easy to see in the example above how “water” could effortlessly flow throughout this living room without getting stuck or obstructed.

Play and experiment with several furniture arrangements until you find the one that allows for the easiest and most graceful flow of Chi.

We all can become used to to the physical obstacles we have in our homes. Maybe it’s that end table that everyone bumps into or the coffee table 2 sizes too big that guests have to squeeze themselves around to take a seat. When you hopelessly peer into a closet jammed with clothes that don’t fit you anymore or when you navigate a maze of furniture just to sit on the couch. All of these things are obstacles, that over time, will have a negative impact on your frame of mind. A Feng Shui living room is designed to relieve stress, where a poorly designed one will amplify it.

The first step is to find the obstacles, then adjust with care. Drawing a blueprint of your living room before moving furniture around is a big help when designing a Feng Shui Living Room.

3. Make Your Living Room Inviting

The Perfect Feng Shui Living Room is a real challenge to create. A comfortable space where both children and adults can relax and spend time is the ultimate goal. Finding the right balance will ensure your living room works both on a practical level and as a focal point of the home. If it’s so nice that you continually worry about the kids or pets messing it up, then it’s really not an inviting family space and isn’t Feng Shui. However, you don’t want it so informal that it becomes a cluttered mess with things carelessly thrown about.

Basically, any good Feng Shui space is one that does the best job for its specific purpose. When designing a room, always keep that room’s overall purpose in mind. Ask yourself specific questions like, what will this room be used for? Who will use the room? How often will we use the room? Designing for beauty at the expense of practicality is simply not good Feng Shui.

Contrary to popular belief, children can help you keep the living room clean if you make it easier for them to do it. Incorporate storage into your design so cleanup becomes a simple matter. This is where built in shelves and cabinets come into play. If you have storage built into your living room design then the possibility of mess and clutter is greatly diminished. Teaching kids to put their toys away is easy if they actually have a place to put them. This ensures that everyone can feel happy and enjoy good Feng Shui energy.

4. Air And Natural Light

Stale air and poor lighting are big enemies of a good Feng Shui living room, so give your room as much light and fresh air as possible. Lots of light and fresh air are both foundations of good Feng Shui design and should both be used whenever possible.

Natural light is always best and you should take advantage of it as much as possible. Don’t hide away behind huge drapes that block out all the sunlight. Open things up and let the light and fresh air in. There are dozens of articles detailing the many health benefits of getting ample amounts of fresh air and sunlight even if your not designing with Feng Shui in mind. This tip is really a no brainer if you’ve got the right windows.

But what if you have a living room with only a few small windows or none at all?

Layered Lighting Is Feng Shui

This brings us to the concept of layered lighting. Layered lighting means that you have several different levels of lighting instead of just one main source. In addition to a ceiling fixture, you can also have a floor lamp and several table lamps, for example. If you limit your living room to a ceiling or floor lamp alone, you’ll end up with shadows and dark spots in the room which can create a gloomy, depressed feel. This is anything but a great Feng Shui living room design.

By using layered lighting you eliminate dark spaces by mimicking natural light. Natural light bounces all around the room, lighting up everything it touches. That’s why in the daytime you don’t have shadows and dark corners. Make sure light comes from all directions from multiple light sources and angles for a more energizing, inviting feel.

The benefits of fresh air to your health are numerous and can help your family feel better both physically and emotionally. To keep the air flowing, open your windows as often as possible. Living rooms can also benefit from an aromatherapy diffuser and the healing power of pure essential oils.

5.Feng Shui Colors

Once you have all the basics under control. No clutter, good flow, lots quality air and plenty of light along with practical beauty, it’s time to think about using a proper Feng Shui color scheme.

Finding the perfect color scheme is essential as it has an enormous impact on our mood and overall frame of mind. Color goes hand in had with emotion, like the feeling evoked by a bright red Ferrari or succulent piece of brown chocolate. Using colors to amplify positive feelings is an integral part of good feng shui.

Colors are an expression of specific Feng Shui elements which you can reference above in the 5 Elements and Bagua Feng Shui charts.

Bring power and happiness into your space with the oranges and reds of the fire element. Improve relationships and health with the yellow and brown tones of the earth element. Attract wealth and stronger family ties with the greens and browns of the wood element. Give your career a boost with the blue and black tones of the water element. Or stimulate creativity and travel with the whites and grays of the metal element.

Like with other Feng Shui principles, always keep your rooms purpose in mind when designing. If your serious about creating the ultimate Feng Shui Living Room then you have to find the absolute perfect color scheme, you’ll never achieve your goal without it.

Pro Tip: Don’t be afraid of color when designing Feng Shui. Color is one of your greatest allies. Many novice Feng Shui designers play it too safe because they’re scared of making a mistake. Take smart chances and experiment with some bolder colors.

6.Plants

In Feng Shui, plants embody life. But what does that does that actually mean in real life? Well, green house plants and flowers are actual living things connecting us to nature, bring vibrancy and life into our homes. Plants share the space with us, they eat and breath just like we do. Breathing in harmful CO2 and breathing out healthy oxygen.

Plants are beautiful and make us happy. Happiness leads to better health and sense of overall well being. When you think of plants think freshness, health, and vitality.

Whether or not you’ve consulted a bagua, you can still enhance a room’s flow by incorporating all of the Feng Shui elements in the design. These elements include fire, water, earth, metal, and wood. One or possibly even two of those elements, earth and wood, are represented by including plants.

In general, a balanced home will have an even spread of all the elements throughout its living spaces. Make sure that your living room honors each element in some way. This may mean simply incorporating the physical elements themselves, such as a metal-backed chair, potted plant, wooden bench, decorative fountain, and candle.

It could also mean acknowledging each element with an image or color.

The most important thing to remember is to find plants that you can easily care for and are appropriate for the space. For example, take things like the level of natural light into consideration. Some plants need a lot of light to thrive while others need very little.

Pro Tip: If you’re new to plants, try some easy ones at first. Dead plants definitely won’t help you achieve the ultimate Feng Shui living room.

7. Create Balance

While it’s important to select colors and shapes that are most beneficial for good Feng Shui, to only use those choices would be a disaster. A living room decorated completely in pink for your love area or in your career area is not at all the point. When referencing the 5 Elements and Bagua, view them as a guide for the overall design, not a steadfast rule for every item in the room. The point of Feng Shui is to achieve the proper balance and harmony.

All in all, your living room’s feng shui depends on your own ability to inhabit it with ease and well-being.

Build living room Feng Shui by incorporating a variety of elements discussed above. Together they will help you achieve good balance, creating a more comfortably and therefore happier, healthier environment to live in.

Feng shui is all about health, balance, and harmony, and we need a balance between all five feng shui elements in our living room to thrive and be happy. Good feng shui in your living room is based on a subtle dance of all colors and shapes, with two or three taking the main stage based on the feng shui bagua requirements.

For example, you can still have a mirror (water feng shui element) in the south bagua area (ruled by the fire feng shui element) if you do not make it into a focal point. For this purpose, you might choose a mirror with a fiery shape, such as a sunburst, that incorporates a fire element material like a gold finish.

Pro Tip: Play with a variety of Feng Shui techniques to achieve a strong balance and keep in mind the 5 Elements and Bagua are your guide.

Essential Feng Shui Living Room Tips

Feng Shui is a powerful principle that can help you live a better life, in your own space. Achieve living room Feng Shui by selecting a variety of elements inspired by the 5 Elements of Feng Shui and the Bagua. Organization and purpose are key factors in a balanced room. Make sure that your decor reflects ease and harmony. Don’t forget about the importance of light and fresh air.

Creating the Ultimate Feng Shui living room is quite a challenge, and we hope this article helps in some small way to achieve your goal of a healthier, happier home.

 

If you have any questions or comments e-mail us any time. We’d love to hear from you.