Many people believe that a dream home is something that only becomes possible for the very rich – the 1% if you will.
For that reason, when they think of a dream home, their mind produces images of really grand places.
Remember “Fiddler on the Roof?”
If I were a rich man…
I’d build a big, tall house with rooms by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below
There would be one long staircase just going up
And one even longer coming down
And one more leading nowhere, just for show
However, Feng Shui teaches that the best home for you is a home large enough so you don’t feel crowded, but small enough that you and your family members can easily charge it with positive energy.
How tall is your dream home?
According to Feng Shui, homes in one story are best, because they are safer, more comfortable, and have more harmony.
Super high ceilings and staircases (all staircases) create imbalances of energy in any home.
So if you love high ceilings and if you want to have staircases – you can – make sure that your have proper Feng Shui guidance so that these features don’t end up causing drama at home.
Watch the video to learn more about the issues that stem from having a home with high ceilings and staircases.
Now It’s Your Turn to Have a Home and Life You Love
Feng Shui is very complex and if your try to do it yourself, you risk ruining the look, the comfort and the luck of your home. Do it with guidance. Explore the Feng Shui Dream Home Creation Lab here.
https://feng-shui-for-us.teachable.com/p/feng-shui-dream-home-creation-lab-2/
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone. We are continuing with our series to help you visualize your dream home. And today we’re talking about the height. You have to visualize the height of your home. And one of the things that are required for this is that you not just think about the number of stories that your home is going to have.
How Grand Is Your Dream Home?
So, imagine that you are standing across the street from your dream home. How high do you want it to be? Do you want it to be just one floor and then the roof? Or do you want it to have one floor, another floor, and then the roof. I guess few people would like to have more than two floors going up. But you might have one floor and an attic, two floors and an attic, and you may also have a home that’s just one floor that you can see off the ground, but it may be on a lot that goes down to the back, so you may actually have one or two floors underneath. There are so many options for homes and height.
The Ideal Feng Shui Height
Now I have to tell you, ideally, in feng shui, what you want is a home that is all in one story with no staircases at all. That is the ideal for feng shui happiness. There are a lot of issues that come with stairs, any kind of staircase, that I’m going to, share with you in a few minutes, but first let’s talk about the overall impression of the home.
The ideal home is on a plot of land that is a little bit elevated from the street, and not that goes down from the street. So if you have a hill, so you have a hill, you have a street, and then the hill keeps going down.
The property on this side has good feng shui, the property on this side doesn’t have good feng shui. It needs the help of a Nine-Steps-to-Feng-Shui consultant, like me or any of the consultants that I have licensed and certified, to help you off set that situation.
Visualize the Height
So, think about how you want your dream home to be. How many floors, how many stories above the ground? How many stories below the ground? Now, in some places, if you live, for example, in Nashville, or Kansas, I’m thinking the places in the United States that are known for having trouble with, tornadoes, right? You would probably want to have a basement. That’s just a matter of being practical and survival, but in places where not is, that’s not the case, you would want to have a ranch. A ranch is your ideal home.
Sometimes It’s Prohibitive
Now, in some cases, it is just prohibitive to have a home in just one floor because the cost of land is so high, so you want to have at least two stories. And, whenever you are going to have more than one story, there’s two really important things that you have to consider in terms of feng shui. In the first place, if you have more than one story, you’re going to have staircases, and staircases cases that always trouble because they’re considered waterfalls of chi.
Waterfalls of Chi
Chi rushes down staircases. So in any home with more than one story you’re going to have staircases. And the other problem is that sometimes you’re going to have double height ceilings.
So let’s first talk about staircases. The worst type of staircase you can have is a staircase that is facing the front door. So if you open the front door and there’s a staircase going up, that’s a problem because all the chi from the second floor from the second story is going to come tumbling down the staircase and go out as soon as you open the door. And what that means, it’s a home that is depleted of chi a home where you’re going to feel tired. It’s also not a pretty site.
The second worst issue that you’re going to find is that you open the door and there’s a staircase going down. In that case, you’re going to feel like your life is going downhill.
Split Foyers are Trouble
And the third problem with staircases is when you open the door into a split foyer, when part of the stairs go up and part go down, that is associated with being indecisive because whenever you come home, as soon as you open the front door, you have to make the decision going up, going down, and that causes decision fatigue.
So in any case, if you are building or remodeling, do not make the staircase be the first thing you see when you open the door, that’s not good function and it’s not practical. Even if it’s not located facing the door, a staircase is still going to have the problem that the chi tumbles down, the life force stumbles down the staircase, and you want to have a landing.
Landings Are Necessary!
If, when I was studying architecture, if I designed a home with a staircase, with no landing, I would get a bad grade, even if it’s, technically correct, because it’s up to code, a staircase. I would get a bad grade because it’s considered poor architectural design. And guess what? In the United States, most homes don’t have a landing in their staircase. We just have one flight of stairs. landings a lot more commonly in businesses, but in homes it’s let’s make it as narrow as we can. Let’s just make it one flight of steps.
So having one flight of steps is not recommended. it’s even worse when it’s like a tunnel staircase where you have been completely sealed by walls on both sides of the staircase going up, going down doesn’t matter, but it’s like a tunnel staircase, right?
All Staircases Have Solutions
In feng shui, for every situation I have mentioned with staircases today, and for other situations, there’s a solution. So staircases are a problem, but there are solutions for that, but this is not something that you want to DIY. You don’t want to try and do it yourself. You want to DIG. dig, do it with guidance.
Because there are so many different possibilities and there are so many different ways that you could address this. And especially because you want it to look good, you don’t want to run the risk that in order to correct a problem with the chi tumbling down a staircase, you end up creating something that looks really strange or bizarre. So you really want to have a guidance for this. Staircases, are always going to be an issue. And. even when you have a landing, even if the staircase is superbly designed with the landing and everything, there’s always a risk that somebody could fall down the stairs.
Handrails Are a Must
And because you’re navigating different heights of levels, right, you need a handrail. You must have a handrail that is really firm, that is really secure. If your staircase is safe for a child that is two or three years old to go up and down, then you have better feng shui than if a staircase is not safe. So those staircases that are like floating in the air, that don’t have risers, you have the step and then you have the riser.
And so those staircases that you can see through not good feng shui? Staircases without handrails or banisters, first of all it’s illegal, it’s not, up to code, they’re super unsafe, and in some cases, it is within code to not have a handrail for the last, I believe it’s, in some places it’s four in some places it’s seven steps and that is still dangerous.
This is A Bad Trend
So you got to be sure that you have a good handrails. There’s some new trends, some super popular things. If you watch those, realtor shows where they’re selling the million-dollar homes, you’re going to see there’s this, glass, tempered glass or acrylic, banister handrails instead of the proper classical ones, which are solid, and not transparent. Those are really bad.
The Trouble with High Ceilings
When you have more than a story you are going to have, in some cases, double height ceilings. In regards to ceiling height, everybody says they love high ceilings and yes, high ceilings are really beautiful to look at, but not, they’re not so comfortable to be in and some spaces need higher ceilings.
For example, if you have a room that is up to 15 by 15, feet in size, you can have the regular eight-foot-high ceiling and it looks good, it doesn’t feel oppressive, but if the room is bigger than that, if you have a family room that’s 25 by 25 and you have an eight-foot ceiling, that’s going to feel too low and oppressive.
Sometimes You Need Them
So in some spaces that are larger, like an open concept living area with dining and kitchen, you’re probably going to want a taller ceiling, higher ceiling. If you have a master bedroom that is large or a master suite, you’re going to want your ceilings a little bit, higher too, but having double height that creates drama that creates, that is an excess.
Placating Drama
So in the Nine-Steps-To-Feng-Shui system, which I use for all my consulting services and courses, step number one is to complete the floor plan. And step number two is to correct imbalances. Correcting imbalances means that you look at all the excesses and all the deficiencies and you balance those out. And so the staircase, is an excess and an inefficiency when you have a very narrow staircase with just one slide of stairs and with walls on the sides. That is too steep, that is too narrow, and it is too dark.
So those are excesses and imbalances. You have to compensate for those with good, proper feng shui guidance and advice. And the double height ceiling is also an imbalance. It happens a lot when you open your door into a foyer and sometimes you have a double height ceiling, so you are in the foyer, and it feels like a tower and you look up and sometimes there’s two or even three floors above the foyer.
Your Home is not a Church
And that just doesn’t feel good. that might be a good feeling, for a church, for a segment of a church that goes up like that, but not at a home, not at a home, but if you already have that situation, don’t freak out because there are things that you can do that are quite easy to do it, with the right knowledge, you can do them really easily and you can make that foyer feel like it has a human scale, and like it’s not so dramatic. And, if you have a living room or great room with double height ceilings or triple height ceilings, and it may look majestic and everybody will say, oh, I love it. But people don’t spend time in that space. So they go into the little den at the back to the, the family room in the basement, but they don’t use up the great room.
The Loss of the Human Scale
They don’t use the great room because it’s just so not cozy, yeah too expansive. And so people don’t like places where they feel like they are tiny. A space that is large and has too high a ceiling makes you feel like you are tiny and people don’t like to feel like that. But again, with feng shui guidance and advice, there are simple things that you can do to make your space look smashing and feel comfortable so that you actually use it.
Visualizing Is About “Seeing” in Your Mind
And so as you visualize your dream home, you have to think about these things. When I’m standing outside a home, do I want to see one floor and a roof, two floors and a roof, or more floors and a roof. Do I want a flat top, in the United States, most houses have these slanted roofs, but in other countries, closer to the tropics, people don’t want a roof that is slanted. They want a flat roof. That’s called a terrace, like a large balcony at the top of the house where, many families will do their clothes washing by hand there, they will hand their clothes to dry over there.
Some families will have businesses that operate in open air and, that’s a different style of living right, and a different style of building. So you have to think about these things as you visualize your dream, start imagining what you want to see. And then as you come into the home, it’s going to, is there going to be a lower level? Is there going to be an unfinished basement that you can use for storage or for, to use as a shelter if there’s a storm or do you want to have a completely finished basement or a half basement that you can enjoy in different ways?
How Much Do You Want to Work Your Legs and Knees?
And also think about the effort and the struggle of going up and down the stairs. I think it’s very interesting that my younger friends, they want stairs, they want to home with several floors, at least two floors. But my friends, as they are aging, they want a home in one floor because they don’t want to have to go up and down the stairs, carrying the laundry basket, for example. Think about what is your ideal home height today in term of stories and in also in terms of stairs and in terms of how high the ceilings are.
Think Long Term
And then imagine, ask yourself the question, is this still going to be my dream home in five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years after retirement. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in my next video.
How’s Your Dream Home Looking in Your Mind?
Now that you know everything you need to keep in mind regarding home height and staircases, what’s your decision? Are you going to visualize a home with or without stairs? Share below.
Feng Shui is very complex and if your try to do it yourself, you risk ruining the look, the comfort and the luck of your home. Do it with guidance. Explore the Feng Shui Dream Home Creation Lab here.
