Feng Shui Tips: How to Decorate a Child's Bedroom

Simon Brown's helpful book Essential Feng Shui: Your Practical Guide to Health, Wealth and Happiness is loaded with concise tips that are easy to grasp and commonsensical (and I say that in the most complimentary way - it's rubbish to plow through a feng shui book that hits you with double-barreled mysticism when you're looking for practical decorating advice). Here are a few of Brown's tips on decorating a child's bedroom. 

• If more than one child sleeps in the same bedroom, bunk beds will save space and the kids will both be facing the same direction when they sleep. This will help prevent arguments between them.
• Beds should be cozy, so use plump pillows and fluffy duvets and comforters. Keep your bedding fabrics 
• Avoid lamps (trailing cords aren't ideal around young childen anyway). Wall lights are great, and uplights that reflect off the ceiling support growth energy.
• Natural wood is good flooring material and it's easy to clean.
• Fabric window blinds make ideal window treatments. They don't block chi energy flow and when they're rolled up, they maximize the room to full chi exposure.
• Don't hang mobiles directly over a child's bed, but mobiles can be either rousing or relaxing additions to a child's bedroom (metal: rousing; soft fabric in light colors: relaxing).
• Select fabric wall hangings for the walls whenever possible, and choose positive images. Select either bright colors (stimulating) or soft colors (soothing), depending on the child's temperament.
• Select furniture with rounded edges (stools, tables, chairs). A good location for a play table is in the east side of the room, facing east (good active energy there).
• There are a variety of feng shui appropriate wall and accent colors for a child's bedroom. Softer shades will induce calm while brighter colors are more stimulating. Plain walls and bed covers reduce the impression of clutter. A soft blue is a good color to use, bright green and yellows (in small accent doses) provide stimulation without breaking the room's sense of harmony, yellow is a great color to use in any part of a child's bedroom, and star motifs introduce fire energy (good). Soft pastels and pale purple inject more calm into the room.
• Avoid: open doors and open curtains at night; placing the heads of beds below windows; clutter; electrical equipment like TVs or computers; big, bulky furniture (kids need lots of open space). 

Bonus

Click here to read 6 Feng Shui Tips to Make Your Bedroom Better.

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Feng Shui Tips - The Power of Color in Decorating

Franca Giuliani - Within feng shui as within design, color is very important and powerful. Before trying to pick out the "right color” for home decorating, let's try to understand color.

Color is energy. (And, remember,everything is energy.) Colors are specific wavelengths of energy that can be used to balance ourchi, our life force. Here's what colors can do for you and yours:

• Colors have an impact on our emotions and our vibration. They possess the power to arouse or to tranquilize, to bring joy or create depression. 
• Colors engage our eyes and influence how we interpret our emotional experiences. By understanding the emotional context of colors, we can manipulate the experience of space to benefit our energetic body.

Color Has Three Dimensions

HUE: This is the first recognizable characteristic of a color. It's the quality by which we distinguish one color from another, as red, yellow, etc.

VALUE: The quality by which we distinguish a light color from a dark color (or how clean the color is). Value is raised by adding white and is lowered by adding black. Colors change in value with light - the brighter the sun, the more light you have coming into a room, the brighter the room colors will be.

INTENSITY: The quality by which we distinguish a strong color from a weak one. Color is lowered in intensity by adding gray or by adding its complementary color. 

Color Has Harmony

This is an agreeable combination of colors, and there are two kinds of harmony.

CONTRASTED HARMONIES use colors on the opposite side of the color wheel. Most common are complementary colors - exactly opposite.

RELATED HARMONY uses colors close to each other on the color wheel or only one color. Analogous colors are

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Feng Shui Tips: Are Your Rooms Missing Anything?

Franca Giuliani - Living in a home or working in an office that has the shape of a square or rectangular is ideal in feng shui. It offers balance and incorporates a complete bagua. The bagua is an energetic map that divides up any space - from a room to an entire house - into eight sectors plus the center, each with its own powerful attributes.

Now it's not easy to find perfect squares and rectangles in our homes, apartments, or offices. With incredible design concepts and necessities like bumping out in a room to add a closet, different shapes are created. So what do you do if you have a missing sector?

 

Well, first you should symbolically “square the space off.” This is quite easy to do if you have access to the outdoors. You can use bushes, fences, flowers, anything to create that outline needed to “complete the space.”

You should also figure out what sector you're missing and then compensate that space by adding the element of the missing sector. And you can be creative about it! You can add furniture, pictures, fabrics ... you can even paint the whole room the element color! Just follow these guidelines below. If you're missing the following sector, add that direction’s element near that missing sector.

 

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Feng Shui Homework - Free Your Closets, Free Your Mind

Franca Giuliani - For the record, please note that this is not a “clutter clearing” article. It's a Closet Clearing Summons. There's a difference.

We use closets as a place for storage, unless you have a huge walk-in closet like the one in the top photo (I call that more of a "clothes showroom"). I believe this to be a very noble thing, because we're humans and humans need stuff, and we have to store that stuff. However, many people use closets as the immediate solution to get things out of sight. Don’t know what to do with something? Well, put it in the closet! Where does this go? Don’t know. Well, put it in the closet!

Eventually we've created a plethora of items hidden away in closets, some items needed and some items completely useless.

In feng shui, closets represent our subconscious mind. Depending where the closets are, they can give us a lot of information as to what we don’t want to deal with in our lives, or better yet what we should deal with.

So let me suggest to you that by sorting out your closets, it may help you sort out your mind.

Once, I had a client who had a box of legal papers in her bedroom closet. These papers had something to do with an incident that happened many years ago, before her teenage daughter was born. My client was so afraid that her daughter would find the box.

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Fountains and Feng Shui

(fountain by Damien Jones Art)Damien Jones Art makes these very original sculptures with water features. I saw them at the Architectural Digest Home Design Show in NYC this past March 2012.  To create his fountains, he uses ceramic embedded with an ammonite fossil of a nautilus shell.

Feng shui products come in all shapes, sizes, and materials. The uses of feng shui fountains are many - there are indoor and outdoor feng shui fountains, tabletop, free standing, wall-mounted, and more for the home and garden. A feng shui fountain helps to balance energy and increase personal strength. Feng shui garden fountains can add peace of mind. Water fountains bring the energy of water, one of the ancient feng shui symbols.  When selecting your feng shui fountain look for a quality fountain with a nice smooth design that is easy to clean and care for. 

(Fluid Grace founain, courtesy of Damien Jones Art)

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