What feng shui sees in the White House

A street aimed at the door

Feng shui reads a house through its door first. The door is the mouth of the house, and what it takes in depends on what comes toward it. A road carries chi the way a river carries water, and a straight one aimed at a door sends it in like an arrow, too fast to settle. Feng shui calls it a road rushing at the door.

The White House’s north door faces Sixteenth Street, which comes down from the north in one straight line, its center line passing through the front door of the house and out its back door. There is a stranger detail still. That line was once meant to mark a new meridian for the world, a line to count the globe’s longitude from, and it runs straight through the White House door.

The classic answer to a rushing road is something standing between road and door, a screen wall, a low wall or a dense hedge, so the chi has to turn and slow down before it arrives. In front of the White House lies Lafayette Park, seven acres of it, the largest screen wall in the city. The street ends at the park, the chi circles through the trees, and it reaches the door as a steady approach instead of a rush.

A desk that commands the room

Feng shui gives the best seat in a room a name, the command position: a solid wall behind it like a mountain, an open view ahead, the door in sight and the whole room before the eyes. A seat like that, the tradition holds, lets a person stay put, think clearly and make up their mind.

The Oval Office has sat in the southeast corner of the West Wing since 1934, looking over the Rose Garden. The desk stands before three tall windows, with the fireplace and the seating at the far end. From the desk the whole room lies in view, and no corner hides behind it: the first half of the command position is complete. The second half stays open, because behind the desk there are windows, not a wall, and feng shui reads a window at your back as a seat with nothing to lean on.

A room without corners

The Oval Office holds a rarer kind of wholeness: it has no corners. Feng shui treats a sharp corner aimed at a person as a blade, and here the walls curve all the way around, so chi circles the room without striking anything. Old Chinese thought held that heaven is round and the earth square; round is the shape of heaven, of turning and of holding all things within. To feng shui, setting the nation’s weightiest desk inside a round room is a telling stroke.

What your own home can take from it

• A wall behind your desk and the door in view: feng shui calls it the command position, where you can stay put and think clearly. If the window has to stay behind you, lower a blind and switch to a chair with a high, solid back to stand in for the wall. Where the desk goes
• A road or a driveway aimed at your door calls for something in between, a dense hedge or a low wall, or a front walk that bends. Feng shui holds that a rushing road left alone lets money come in fast and leave just as fast. The front door
• Fewer sharp corners aimed at the places where you sit and sleep: turn the furniture, or set a round-leaf pet-safe plant in front of the corner. Feng shui holds that a room with fewer points keeps tempers softer. Sharp corners

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