I’m always interested in what we can learn from other cultures.

I really don’t know much about feng shui, but I remember that when Dana and I were trying to sell our home in New Jersey, we had several propsective buyers who liked the home except that the main staircase was straight and was aligned with the front door, making the house unacceptable. I do think there should be an addition to the MLS to indicate whether a property was designed with feng shui principles in mind; it must be difficult to house hunt if this is an important issue for the buyer.

I was in San Francisco last week at a convention at the Moscone Center.  I frequently took lunch by visiting the Whole Foods on 4th St., near Harrison.  It has the best salad bar I’ve ever seen.  Highly recommended, should you happen to be in the area.  You can take lunch to go and walk over to the Yurba Buena Gardens.  On a sunny day (and San Francisco does have several such days each year) it’s a great way to lunch and frugal, too.

But in addition to the salad bar, I was quite taken with the entryways at Whole Foods.  There are the usual motion-activated sliding glass doors, but these open into a small antechamber.  To continue on into the store you must go left or right around a glass wall.  Initially I thought it awkward to maneuver around it, especially at the busy lunch hour, but then I realized that it also prevented gusts of cold air from having direct flow into the store.  While San Francisco certainly isn’t the coldest city in the States, it is frequently chilly, and it can be windy. 

On the East Coast, it’s not unusual for a store or restaurant to have a small room at the front door to contain the draft created by the customer traffic through the front door.   In New York City, where space is at a premium, a heavy curtain is frequently ued instead of a separate room.  Most homes don’t have such an entryway, but sometimes apartment buildings do.

So, maybe the centuries-old principles of feng shui were motivated in part to keep home and hearth warm.  After all, it’s all about the ch’i, the energy.

Tags: energy conservation, feng shui, frugal lunching

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