Posted Fri Apr 10 19:37:00 UTC 2009

Creatures feel better in some buildings than in others. Imagine a buried box with an entrance from above, an airy hut in a tree, or a little house on the ground, and most spiders would choose the first, most birds the second and most humans the third of these homes. And then you may ask: And which kind of building is it where people generally feel best? Are there any rules?

I came to this question since as a realtor I see hundreds of homes every year, and it is obvious to me that some have definitely a better feel to them than others. Every home has a specific feel to it, and at some point I began to classify them secretly with a scale from 1 to 10 calling it the “Feeling Factor”. Talking about with others I noticed that their “Feeling Factor” was surprisingly similar to mine, so the question was inevitable: Are there any rules to this? The more you think the more interesting it gets.

Let’s take painting first. Most people would agree that some paintings are far more appealing and simply superior to others, bur if we would want to put up rules on how to do a master-painting, the idea would be considered as unorthodox, to say the least. Individuals feel individual, they say, and art is art. Don’t try to scale.

But, after all, the Feeling Factor might be the single most important feature for the use of a home in the long run. So even if it is very off-focus, it may well pay to put it on stage and to give it a serious thought.

Contemporary architects build homes focused on design rather than well-being (yes, I hear the storm of protest). Splendid isolation, lot of privacy and focus on view are high in demand. When built, interior designers will try to make it appealing, and proud owners imagine how they’ll show their masterpieces to their impressed fellows. Shortly after, they start to feel isolated, lonely and anxious. Constructions of the past were often restricted by scarcity of the variety of building materials and of heating means, so probably there is no big learning effect from them. One thing that is remarkable is that they built quite close together, in times and through ages. People seemed to like to live in herds, how about today? Since “feeling” cannot be measured, it escapes our science. One of the few manuals which puts full focus on Feeling Facor is Feng Shui, an ancient art and science developed over 3,000 years ago in China. It is a complex body of knowledge that reveals how to balance the energies of any given space to assure the health and good fortune for people inhabiting it. It follows Chinese Taoism which is based on the five elements, on Chi the flow of energy and on the principle of Ying and Yang.

Feng Shui became en vogue in our societies about a decade ago, and I paid some time and some attention to it. A bunch of principles which is complicated and utterly strange (“put a shallow bowl with pieces of carbon in the lower left corner on the room’s floor”…) makes you feel uneasy and sceptical. But astonishingly enough, every time I followed the proposal of Feng Shui to change a disturbing situation, or to enhance the well-being within a home, it worked. Feng Shui starts out with the planning of a home, giving advice on how to do the layout and so on, but it equally deals with solving the problems of existing property, may it be the property itself or a disturbing surrounding.

Of course Feng Shui is not the ultimate set of rules for creating a feeling-good factor within a property. It comes from far away and long ago. But it is surprisingly useful for who understands that there is a specific feeling to each property that this feeling can be localized and can be modified with appropriate measures. A good starting point I suppose.

Therefore: More concentration on feeling good, please. When constructing, when choosing, when decorating a home, yes respect aesthetics, sculptural quality, functionality, view, privacy, ecc, but listen to your heart. Who may hear it hears the language of the Feeling Factor.

Posted By: Ueli F. Schnorf