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Morning light in a European apartment
A jade bracelet resting on stone
A villa corridor at dawn
The Art of Placement

A room can be persuaded.

Feng shui is not decoration and it is not superstition. It is three thousand years of notes on how people feel in the spaces they live in — where the light falls, where the back is exposed, where the eye rests. Choose an element below and we will show you what belongs where.

Est. 1 of 5 elements · Scroll to begin

Every house already has an opinion about you. It decides where you sit, which corner you avoid, which room the arguments happen in. Feng shui is simply learning to answer back.

01

Read the room

Where does the light enter, where does your back sit exposed, where does the eye stop? Before any object is bought, the room is mapped.

02

Find the missing element

A space that feels wrong is almost always short of one of five things. Naming it is ninety per cent of the correction.

03

Place one thing well

One considered object in the right position outperforms a shelf of ornaments. Then leave it alone and live there.

The Five Elements

Choose the one your room is missing

Wu Xing — the five phases. Select an element to read what it governs and see the pieces that carry it.

Wood
Wood · East · Southeast

The element of beginning again.

Wood is the first light of the cycle — the impulse that pushes a shoot through frozen ground. Place it in the east of a home when a family is starting something: a business, a marriage, a child, a second act. It rewards patience and punishes clutter.

Governs
Growth, family, new beginnings
Direction
East · Southeast
Palette

Keep something living in the east of the room. A single branch is enough.

Room by Room

Three places worth getting right

If you only correct three areas of a home, make them these.

Where everything enters
The Entrance

Where everything enters

The door is the mouth of the house — whatever the day brings comes in through it. Keep the first three metres clear, put one solid, beautiful object where the eye lands, and never let a mirror face the door directly.

Where you are unguarded
The Bedroom

Where you are unguarded

A solid wall behind the headboard, a clear view of the door without lying in line with it, nothing stored underneath the bed. Small corrections here are felt faster than anywhere else in a home.

Where the work happens
The Desk

Where the work happens

Sit with your back to a wall and the room in front of you — the command position. One metal piece on the left of the desk for clarity, one dark stone on the right for staying power.

“We do not arrange rooms to change our luck. We arrange them so that on the worst day of the year, the house is still on our side.”
Lin Wei — ORIENS consulting master, thirty-one years reading floor plans
Not sure where to start?

Send us your floor plan

Photograph or sketch the room, tell us which way the main window faces, and one of our consultants will write back with a placement plan. No charge, no obligation.

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