I was called in a couple of days ago to consult on a recently Feng Shui renovated house in Pacific Palisades, California. The owners—let’s call them Alex and Jill—had moved in only six weeks prior with their two children and, so they told me, a string of “unusual business losses” had suddenly unfolded for the husband and one of their two sons was having a “horrible time adjusting to the new house” whilst their second son had suddenly began receiving daily notes from his teachers lamenting “bad behavior and difficulty with other children.”
Those of you who read my newsletters regularly are probably rolling your eyes right now and thinking “there you are—evidence that the energy of the house needs adjusting” and you are right. After consulting on it I found that the house had some serious problem that needed urgent fixing. That was not an issue, they came to the right place for that.
But what is peculiar about this particular case is that I had also found out that the entire renovation had already been designed upon another consultant’s Feng Shui recommendations. The owner’ scope for renovations was significant, and so was the budget, and several design choices were made specifically based on this previous consultant’s recommendations.
I am not going to go into the details of who the consultant was and what was not pointed out correctly. However, it serves to say two main points about this particular situation:
1) The previous consultant came from a spurious background, meaning: she mixed and matched some elements of Traditional Feng Shui with those of Western Feng Shui. This is very rarely, if ever, a good idea. Traditional (and Scientific) Feng Shui differs significantly in its application than any other derivative of Feng Shui and they often contradict one another. In addition, aspects of Traditional Feng Shui are extremely complex in their applications and one should be very fluent at it to know what aspects take precedence over another. Based on her applications I can tell she wasn’t proficient in it, and hence the directions she gave were inappropriate for the building and its occupants, in some cases, even conflicting.
2) To make matters worse, this particular consultant had no proficiency in space planning or any experience in design either. How do I know that? Because the recommendations she made didn’t make any sense from a design stand point either. For example, one of the sons belongs to the Wood element in Feng Shui. This means his ideal sleeping direction is East. By no means should a Wood element person like him be sleeping with his head lying towards West. But instead, his bedroom was designed so that the only position the bed could fit was with the headboard on the West wall. Closets, windows, and built-ins were then added in around this during the renovation. But how easy would it have been for a properly trained designer to see on the plans that the headboard was in the wrong place for a Wood element, correct it, and THEN place windows, closets, and built-ins around it? For a trained person, this would be a blink of an eye. For a ‘civilian’, a nearly impossible. Yet, I see this every day with my students: those with a design background could work on a project like this, but those without a design background can only analyze houses that are already built and have difficulty recommending appropriate design changes.
In addition, the house had significant Feng Shui problems due to the original time of its construction which took place forty years ago. If I had been the consultant, it would have been my first priority to acknowledge how this renovation was going to possibly modify its earlier “energy issues” and provide concrete, easy solutions on how to turn the Feng Shui of the house around while under renovation and within the client’s budget. Instead, this was not done by the first consultant and as a result the house still carries the same problems it had even before the renovations began.
“Can they be fixed now?” Some of you may be wondering.
The answer of that is twofold: Yes, we can correct the home’s problems by eliminating what works against Alex and Jill and their two sons and make the house the best it can be for them all. However, we cannot turn it around from bad to good in the same way we could have done while doing the actual structural work or without doing further, expensive structural work for which there is no more budget left at this point.
In short, Alex and Jill did the right thing by wanting to have their home consulted on by a Feng Shui consultant when they first decided to do renovations on it. However, they missed a big opportunity by not having a properly trained, qualified consultant working on their house in the first place and they are now trying to do the best they can to 
correct that for the benefit of their whole family.
If you are planning on investing several hundred thousand dollars in a major renovation of your home and you’d like to incorporate the best Feng Shui possible into your design, give me a call at 310-860-8989. Either I or one of my highly trained students will be happy to assist you properly and help to maximize your renovation budget with clear, easy suggestions that you can integrated seamlessly in your home’s new design.
If you are in the design trade and would like to attend our 18-week Feng Shui Certificate program in Advanced Feng Shui for Architecture, Interior Design & Landscape Online visit our Feng Shui Training Center site at www.FengShuiTrainingCenter.com for schedule and to register.
The next Live Webcast course is scheduled to start on Tuesday November 1, 2016 at 6pm PT. This course is online and you can login from anywhere in the country or abroad.
I am looking forward to helping you turn your renovation into the best Feng Shui house!
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