Feng Shui: Keeping It Positive

Feng shui. Literally, it means wind-water, but to the general public it is a way of arranging your home, office or property in such a way as to invite in the positive energies and dispel the negative. It can be as simple as creating a flow with color, light and furniture placement, or as complicated as reciting prayers and obeying the laws of elements and directions with special figurines or symbols.

On the East End, more and more real estate agents and sellers are turning to this ancient Eastern art as a way to move their properties.

Candace Vorhaus, a feng shui consultant with offices in Sag Harbor, has had several brokers as clients. “It’s similar to staging but it’s different too,” she said. “Different houses have different issues.”

For example, Ms. Vorhaus offered, sometimes a front door—“the mouth of the house, where the energy flows in”—opens with a wall directly across from it. “It’s a metaphor,” she said. “Every day, you are literally walking into a wall.”

A feng shui cure might be hanging a mirror to disperse the light, but not directly across from the front door, as that may push away the good energies. A bright light or a wall painted a bright color can also help.

Michelle Simmons of Hamptons House of Gardens, a feng shui property in Southampton, agrees with Ms. Vorhaus. Both studied with the master feng shui architect R.D. Chin.

“People are much more aware out here than in the other areas,” Ms. Simmons said. “A lot of realtors want to sell a house fast or get a particular assessment, so they create a space to attract the right clients, the person who is supposed to have that house.”

A lot of the secret to Ms. Simmons’s feng shui practice, which she ascribes to every aspect of her life, is intention. “Before buying a work of art or a piece of furniture, I know where it’s going to go. I look at it with feng shui eyes—will it add to the beauty or block it?”

Feng shui usually involves particular colors for particular rooms of your home that follow a bagua—an octagon placed over a blueprint of the living area—that blocks out your house according to the different areas. For example, the center of the home symbolizes health. So if, for example, you have a leaky faucet in a bathroom in the center of your home, or a set of stairs leading to a moldy basement, your physical health might be affected by that.

In an extremely simplified feng shui world, the wealth corner is the upper left, and the relationship corner is the upper right. The back wall is fame or recognition.

And this doesn’t mean just your home. It means each individual room, and your property as a whole.

For those who are renting a home or don’t have the time or money to move a wall or paint a room, there are cures—crystals that create a rainbow of light, chimes to add sound, and color, color, color.

“You need to use bright accents,” Ms. Vorhaus recommended. “A red quilt thrown across the back of the couch, bright yellow or bright orange pillows from TJ Maxx—it raises the energy of the environment. You want vibrant, alive colors,” she said.

“I have a client who went to a craft store and bought canvases, and just painted plain colors on each of them,” Ms. Vorhaus said. “It looked great, and it really changed the vibration of her home.”

In another instance with a client, Ms. Vorhaus recalled that the ranch home had “all the bedrooms at one end, with the doors right across from each other.” The rooms were occupied by the client’s children, who fought constantly. “They were arguing every night—the bedroom door is your personal voice, while the front door is your voice to the world.”

Ms. Vorhaus hung a pre-blessed, multi-faceted crystal between the rooms. “It’s not just that, you need to visualize what you want to happen, and surrender to the Divine,” she said. A few weeks later the client called her. The fighting had completely stopped.

When Ms. Vorhaus and her husband, Robbie, moved to Sag Harbor in 2005, “I was hoping to accomplish family harmony. We have two children, who were 10 and 8, and it was stressful moving out of the city. Robbie was getting involved in a new type of business. So my intention was to bring harmony and peace to the family.”

To achieve this, Ms. Vorhaus painted the family room, dining area and kitchen Paddington blue," a color of harmony and compassion. She also hung 12 animal figures of the Chinese zodiac, which symbolize being able to communicate harmoniously, in the family room. In the center of the kitchen, she hung a faceted feng shui crystal ball—a cure for "harmful destabilizing energies" to send refracted rainbows of light to bring healing and joy.

And to connect the two hemispheres of the brain, Ms. Vorhaus played classical music during homework and meal times, also making sure that family members came together, without their electronic devices, to have dinner each night.

If you can “fix” only an area or two, Ms. Simmons suggests focusing on your home’s entrance and your bedroom. “It’s really important to fix your broken things,” she said. “Leaky faucets, the money is flowing out. It affects your home, your finances and your body.”

There are plenty of books about feng shui, which also involves clutter clearing and space clearing. Ms. Vorhaus has performed several ceremonies to cleanse away bad energies. “One was in a $25 million mansion. It had been rented out for the summer, and the renters had left an ‘icky’ vibe to the place. The owners called me in for a space clearing ceremony.”

In addition to doing consultations with residents, Ms. Vorhaus and Ms. Simmons enjoy working with architects and contractors during the design phase. “Every place is different,” Ms. Vorhaus said. “I walk in with an open mind: What am I going to see here, what am I going to find here?”

And for those who just want to put a mirror here and a crystal there? “Ninety-nine percent of feng shui is about the intention,” Ms. Simmons said. “If you don’t know the mudras or the prayers, it’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. When you set the intention, you affect what the outcome will be.”

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