All round the house

WHEN I bought my Victorian terrace home four years ago, the last of my worries was whether the qi reached every corner of the three-storey building. To be honest, I'd never even heard of qi (pronounced chee), the spiritual energy which, say Feng Shui exponents, needs to roam unhindered in your home to maximise good fortune and well-being.

Back then, I was more preoccupied with finding a plumber to install central heating, a carpenter to build a kitchen and a Lottery win to finance the daunting challenge of turning a run-down empty shell into a liveable home.

The most I knew about Feng Shui - garnered from a friend who swore by it - was that dried flowers brought bad luck, as did having exposed beams in the house.

Quite why, I was never sure, so it was with an equal measure of intrigue and scepticism that I delved for enlightenment into a new book, The Yorkshire Way Of Feng Shui.

The book has been written by York Feng Shui experts Carole Chui and Angi Brereton, who say it's a no-nonsense guide to the ancient Chinese art.

The book follows the similarly-titled courses which Carole and Angi have run in York, although it is written with the Feng Shui first timer in mind. So, with my almost negligible knowledge, I turned to the 100-page book to find out how my home fared on the Feng Shui front.

After reading the first few chapters, I was surprised by how few Feng Shui faux pas I'd actually made.

Most of that was down to sheer luck, but the authors point out that much of the ancient prescriptions are based on good old common sense.

Like Ann Maurice from Channel 5's home makeover show House Doctor, Carole and Angi urge us to start from the outside of the property.

But whereas Ann would be looking at the cosmetic state of the front of the house (for broken guttering, peeling paint and dying plants), Carole and Angi are more interested in things of a cosmic nature. What's important in Feng Shui is the position of the house and crucially the location of the 'Beasts of the five directions': the Red Bird, the Tortoise, the Dragon, the Tiger and the Snake, which all have symbolic significance.

The 'Red Bird', I learned, needs to have space at the front of the house to fly. Since I live in a cramped cul-de-sac, I feared I might have already fallen at the first hurdle. But because many people in Yorkshire live cheek by jowl in terraced accommodation, the authors give advice on how to rescue the situation. I have a small, walled, forecourt garden planted with evergreens, which appears to be just the thing.

Another bit of luck came in the unlikely shape of the run-down buildings to the rear. These form my 'Tortoise', providing essential protection for the back of my home.

To the right should be my 'Tiger', with my 'Dragon' on the left. The Dragon should be larger than the Tiger or equal in size. They can be other houses, trees or bushes to the side of your home. I have buildings on each side, so again, no problem there.

As for the 'Snake', it should be at the centre of the home, but the book had no advice on what form it should take. Never mind, the next step sounded more interesting: tracing the qi through the house to make sure it reached every nook and cranny.

There are guidelines on how to dowse for the qi and how to eliminate any threats to it. Dowsing involves holding a home-made pendulum over a doorway to see if it moves. At this point, my journalistic scepticism got the better of me and I decided to skip this stage, opting instead to see if there were any obvious obstacles to the flow of the qi in my house.

I deduced my hallway was Feng Shui-friendly as the stairs were not ahead of the front door (allowing the qi to rush upstairs too quickly) nor did it lead to the back door (allowing the qi to escape).

If your layout is not so welcoming, the authors suggest some tricks such as using windchimes, a screen, mirrors, or even a circular light fitting on the ceiling to "operate like a traffic roundabout" allowing the qi to move around the ground floor.

Dark corners are death traps for the qi, but lamps can fix matters as can healthy house plants - two things most of us would use instinctively to bring a gloomy area of the house back to life.

In the kitchen, water and fire should be separated, so I felt smug that I had showed such good foresight in placing my cooker apart from the washer/drier, sink and fridge... until I read that Chinese wisdom states the cook should never have her back to the door ("in case the food is spoiled by a startled cook"). Guess where my cooker is? The advice is to use a mirror to reflect the door. I checked to see if the glass door on the oven reflected the entrance way. It did. Just.

But things were not so straightforward in my attic bedroom. It's my favourite room, so I was a bit dismayed to realise it broke almost every rule in the book.

For starters, a room should be regularly shaped and this is anything but. What's more my 'Beasts' were far from happy. The 'Dragon', a bedside cabinet to the left of my bed, is smaller than my 'Tiger', a tall chest of drawers on the right. My 'Tortoise' expects a solid wall behind the bed, where I have an open fireplace. Worse of all, there is a beam in the ceiling. Beams, apparently, are bad news as they press the qi downwards, and it's even worse if the beam is over the bed, effectively dividing you from your partner.

My beam is nowhere near the bed, but with so much going wrong in the room that was little consolation.

At this point, I decided I'd taken my foray into Feng Shui as far as it should go.

Perhaps the book is for people a bit more open minded. But the truth is, I like my bedroom exactly as it is. I'm sorry if my Dragon is bigger than my Tiger and my Tortoise feels a bit vulnerable. All I can say is that I sleep soundly up here every night... without any animal magic.

The Yorkshire Way Of Feng Shui, by Carole Chui and Angi Brereton, priced £9.99, is available from three shops in York: Borders in Davygate; Waterstones in High Ousegate, and Echoes in Shambles.

Updated: 09:15 Tuesday, January 29, 2002