Builders on board with feng shui | feng, shui, home - The Orange ...

Ms. Feng Shui walks into a model home in Irvine and glances around the room.

"You want the front door to be solid, not glass," she says, eyeing the position and color of the door, examining the stairs, checking out the bathroom and inspecting the picture frames.

This dining room incorporates a solid principle of good feng shui by utilizing mirrors and glass which represent water elements.

H. LORREN AU JR., THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A window in the front door, "it's like a hole in your mouth," she says.

Front doors should be blue (for water) or black (representing career). And it should never be in alignment with the back door because "all the energy goes out the back."

Stairs should turn sideways to the front, also to keep the home's energy from rushing outside. A home's energy, or chi, should linger.

"A home should be a place where you recharge," she says. "It should be restful."

Ms. Feng Shui -- a.k.a., Hyun Jung "Jessie" Kim of Lake Forest ? doesn't just advise homeowners. Lately, she's been hired by KB Home to advise its designers on two upcoming developments, Sage at Portola Springs and Garden Hill at Portola Springs.

And major homebuilders like KB Home, Standard Pacific and Lennar have been lining up for years to hire feng shui consultants like Kim.

You generally don't see it mentioned in marketing materials, but a significant number of newly built homes in Orange County and in California have been feng shuied.

It's a housing market trend that's gone on for years under the radar, industry and feng shui professionals say.

KB Home's Ironwood development in Portola Springs: Feng shuied. Standard Pacific's Castillian at Blackstone in Brea? Yep, that too.

Olson Homes' Solano Walk, a new development in Fountain Valley, has been feng shuied up the yin-yang.

"I've been working with (homebuilders) for two dozen years," said feng shui consultant Angi MA Wong of Palos Verdes, who claims to have worked for more than 100 commercial and home developers and recently trained sales people at the Brightwater project in Huntington Beach.

"I've seen the wave come and go," Wong said. "Now, yoga and feng shui have become part of the mainstream."

Fung shui consultants advise home designers and architects on street layouts, home alignment, floor plans, landscaping and interior designs.

They help builders use addresses buyers see as lucky numbers while avoiding unlucky numbers like four ? which in Cantonese sounds like the word "death."

It started as a way to meet the needs of a growing number of Asian homebuyers. But as feng shui went increasingly mainstream, builders began incorporating its centuries-old principles into their designs more and more.

While there are more than two dozen different schools of feng shui, the practice boils down to using design to achieve harmony within a home or work space.

Steve Ruffner, president of KB Home's Southern California division, said his company began looking into feng shui after getting "some simple requests" from its customers, asking if the company could change an address or the color of a front door.

The company responded by inviting feng shui experts to look at its plans and suggest improvements.

"It certainly seemed like it didn't hurt, and it didn't irritate any demographic," he said.

Not only did it not hurt, Ruffner believes it improved the company's home designs.

"How you construct the environment you live in can impact how your life turns out," said Ruffner, a Newport Beach native and feng shui convert. "Since we started doing it, we definitely are getting good feedback from our buyers."

And not just Asian buyers, he added. In the past three years alone, KB Homes has built 3,000 to 4,000 homes that incorporate feng shui into their design in some way.

Jeffrey Lake, Standard Pacific Homes' national director of architecture, says feng shui is just one element of good design. Feng shui principles are incorporated into Standard Pacific projects "at the very beginning" of a development's design, he said.

"It's just the principles, the guiding principles, and sometimes that will connect with good design of a home," Lake said.

Olson Communities President Bill Holford said feng shui design principles "make sense across the board." Holford said the Seal Beach-based Olson Co. already was using feng shui when he joined the firm 10 years ago.

"I think a lot of buyers, regardless of background, look at feng shui as a principle of design," he said.

Many of feng shui's values are common sense.

For example, both Wong and Kim noted that it's bad feng shui to place homes at the top of a T intersection, with car lights flooding into a home's front windows. But that's just plain bad from any standpoint.

Other things are not so obvious.

Kim explained that the sink and the stove top in the kitchen can't be aligned because water and fire shouldn't be together.

Also, you don't want family pictures framed in metal in the family area of the home because metal cuts wood.

"That's considered the destructive cycle," she explained.

Ceiling fans above beds are bad because they deflect energy away from you, she said.

Feng shui devotees like the number eight in an address ? or numbers that add up to eight ? because the word for eight sounds like "wealth" in Chinese and is good for money.

If a home has an unlucky address, the address can be "changed" by adding a hidden number or painting an invisible number on the wall using clear paint or the same color paint.

If an address can't be changed, Wong advises builders to put a less popular model on that lot, saving the most popular models for lots with favorable addresses. It's likely the lot with the unpopular address will sell to a non-Asian buyer "who doesn't know it's a bad number," she said.

"Some people subscribe to it. Some people discount it," said Holford of the Olson Co. "But we chose to incorporate it in the design of our communities. ... I think it's a design element and principle that's becoming utilized throughout (by) a lot of different builders."

Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com

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