What if, when you walked in your front door, you started feeling better, and not just because you were able to breathe the usual sigh of relief at getting home? What if the décor of your living room, the design of your kitchen, and the wall color of your bedroom could mean a salary increase, a healthier body, and a more satisfying love life?

Sound far-fetched? Not to those who have studied and experienced Feng Shui. Far from being a new fad, Feng Shui is the ancient Asian art of designing a home and arranging the spaces in each room, paying close attention to the flow of energy, or Ch’i, through the rooms. A thorough Feng Shui design takes into account everything from the placement of the doors and windows to the choices of lighting and artwork and the location of the bathroom, all with the goal of creating energetic harmony and balance.

As readers of interior design magazines know, the popularity of Feng Shui is surging in the United States and other western countries. The Sheffield School of Interior Design is proud to be a part of this growing movement; so proud, in fact, that we’re offering a new course: The Sheffield School Feng Shui Interior Design Course. Click here for more information. To celebrate the launch of the Sheffield School of Interior Design’s new course in Feng Shui, for January we’re expanding our Room of the Month feature to include two rooms of a Manhattan apartment designed with the principals of Feng Shui, in consultation with R.D. Chin, one of the country’s foremost Feng Shui masters and the lead instructor of our new course.

Looking at two rooms of this apartment, we can see that the Sheffield Guidelines to Interior Design–function, mood and harmony– perfectly complement the principles of Feng Shui, making for a home that’s both well-decorated and well-balanced in terms of the Ch’i.

This apartment, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is owned by Kathleen and John Ullmann. A year and half ago Kathleen Ullmann asked for Chin to give his perspectives on her apartment and what it might need to best balance the energy. The result, she said, is a home where she feels “absolutely different.

“Every time I come in, I get happy because I feel that the sun is dancing and kissing my walls. It’s an interaction with the room,” she said.

Because Ms. Ullmann works helping people heal with cranio-sacral therapy, reflexology, and massage, she knew about how paying attention to the Ch’i in the body can change a person’s health, and it was a quick step from that to seeing how Feng Shui could work in her home.

“Knowing how Ch’i is able to be manipulated in the body, it made perfect sense to me that it can be moved outside the body as well,” she said.

Starting with the foyer, we see in action here the Feng Shui principle of paying attention to the entrance of a home; similarly to the way your first impression of a person influences your relationship with him forever, so too the first impression on entering a home influences how you will feel in that environment. In terms of Feng Shui, the entrance to a home sets the tone for the rest of the home, and is the primary way energy enters the home.

First, let’s look at the function of the foyer. Practically speaking, you want a place where you can shrug off your overcoat, unwrap yourself from the public world, and get ready to enter the inner sanctuary of your home. You also want your guests to experience the feeling of easing into the private world from the public world.

This foyer accomplishes this beautifully. There is a handy umbrella stand by the front door, and a doormat, so that you won’t be tracking outdoor dirt and rain and slush–and the hectic energy of the workaday world–into the house. Looking closely at the photos, you may notice that there is no hallway table, and at first this the very thought of this may make you panic: where would you drop your purse, your keys, the mail, the bag of dog food?

This is actually an intentional part of Feng Shui, and one which many people will find enormously helpful: the reduction of clutter. Clutter in our homes only blocks the flow of Ch’i, and you don’t have to be a practitioner of Feng Shui to know that the more clutter in a home, the more time the residents waste looking for things and moving piles of paper around.

Next, let’s look at the mood of the foyer. It’s decidedly formal, with the pale blue walls, the glass cabinet holding objects d’art, and the framed artwork on the walls. The polished wood floor and recessed ceiling lights contribute to the feeling of formality.

Color, important in any room’s design, takes on added meaning when working with Feng Shui. Ullmann says she wanted to bring the blue of the sky and water of the East River into the room with the color. “I wanted to feel the sense that I wasn’t blocked by walls, but was immersed in the water and the sky,” she said.

Finally, as with any room, you want to ask yourself if the room harmonizes. Looking at the harmony of a home is a key factor in Feng Shui. You may want a home office or a gym to increase your pulse and your thinking a bit, but generally speaking, you want the harmony of a home to influence you to a more calm state than what you experience when you go out into the hustle and bustle of daily life.

Color, important in any room’s design, takes on added meaning when working with Feng Shui.

One reason this foyer feels so soothing is that everything harmonizes. The heavy ceramic Chinese umbrella stand, the glass and wood étagère, the framed artwork, all fit with one another perfectly. As you round the corner from the foyer into the living room, the carved side chair, the small wooden chest and the Oriental carpet also fit with the formality of the entrance.

To test the Sheffield Guideline of harmony, ask yourself how some other piece would look in this room. What if there were an ultra-modern chair instead of the elaborately carved chair? Or what if there were a brushed steel cabinet instead of the glass and wood étagère? It’s easy to see that anything else would stand out and produce a feeling antithetical to harmony, and in that way we can see just how well this entrance harmonizes.

The next room we’ll look at is the bedroom. We all know that the function of any bedroom to provide the ultimate in respite from the public world; the activities of sleeping, snuggling in with a good book, and sharing an intimate moment are the polar opposite of our public selves, and so the bedroom is tucked away from the foyer. It’s as if, in coming into our homes, we shed another layer of our public selves as we enter each room that’s further into the interior.

This bedroom certainly serves the function of providing a place of rest and restoration. The comfortable bed is low enough so that it doesn’t require a gymnastic leap, and the lamps on either side provide reading light for the person sleeping on either the left or right side. The lamps also provide balance between the two sides of the bed.

Red is the color traditionally associated with success

The shelves at the head of the bed provide room for tissues, books, and an alarm clock, but note how little clutter is allowed to accumulate.

The mood of this room is certainly restful, while also invoking passion. Most often, Feng Shui practitioners recommend neutral tones for a bedroom, but here, you’ll note immediately that one wall is a deep red.

One important part of our Course in Feng Shui is the same attention to individuality that is exhibited here. For another homeowner, a different wall color might work, based on her needs, on what elements she wanted to balance, and on the layout of her home.

Here, Ms. Ullmann took into account the bagua, or layout of her home. The wall that she painted red is on the edge of the part of the apartment in charge of fame, and red is the color traditionally associated with success.

“I was going to go with pink walls in the bedroom, but after painting them I felt it was terribly weak, and I decided to incorporate the red for that one wall, because that wall backs up to the fame gua. Everything else in the apartment was white. I felt strongly that I needed not just enhancement of my relationship gua, but that I also needed more fire there,” she said.

In terms of harmony, this room has the same kind of harmony that we saw in the foyer. Nothing in this room is out of place; it is simple, soothing, and assures a good night’s sleep.

Do the occupants of this apartment feel any different, now that they’re living in a room that’s been designed by one of the country’s foremost Feng Shui experts?

“Now, I dance with my living room,” Ms. Ullmann says. The way the sunlight comes in and hits the wall color changes every time she comes in the room, so the color is always changing. “Life is there,” she said.

It’s easy to see how using Feng Shui can help any room’s design, and how the Sheffield Guidelines of function, mood and harmony themselves harmonize with the principles of Feng Shui, which, after all, are simply the roots of all good design. Feng Shui isn’t a cure-all or a religion; it’s simply a way to create beautiful and harmonious homes which, in turn, can promote balance and well-being. Click here for more information on the Sheffield Feng Shui Interior Design Course.