Feng shui and real estate

washington.edu

Yesterday I attended a delightful class, taught by Steven Post at the San Francisco Association for Realtors (SFAR) offices.

He started out by quoting Vitruvius, and saying (liberally paraphrased) that he felt that the Realtor (as well as the Architect, as Vitruvius was proposing) should be a philosopher, bringing both ancient and modern knowledge and wisdom to the task of helping people find and create their most auspicious home and work environments.

Wikipedia

Well, that got my attention as you can imagine, given my tendency to wax philosophical about people and place.

Fung shui is Chinese geomancy. The name Fung (wind) shui (water) comes from Kuo Pu's poem

The winds are wild

The sun is bright

The water is clear

The trees are lush.

Which describes our wonderful golden gate quite well I think.

The Japanese, the British isle cultures, Arabs, Africans, Jews, and ancient great mother cultures also have well developed geomantic traditions which seek to align people with place in harmonious ways.

Alex Stark

Mr. Post  validated my weather and topography fixation by noting that early Fung shui was developed in the Yellow River valley, where it is very cold in the winter, thus south facing locations are deemed beneficial. As the discipline moved to more clement locations in China, east was added as a beneficial direction. Practitioners of some Indian geomantic traditions would find south the opposite of beneficial, as in their climate a south facing dwelling would be exposed to miserable heat. Thus we must keep in mind the underlying geographic realities when applying the rules of Fung shui or any other geomantic tradition.

While these traditions have developed elaborate bodies of knowledge, which are wonderful to study, so much of this is really quite intuitive, as our creature selves tell us whether a place feels good or not. We can start with that, then break down what the geomantic (read: bio-geographic) influences might be, so we can tell if the good feelings will last once the stager with the vanilla fragrance sticks and beautiful furniture has packed and gone.