Harmony and flow. If those ideas feel like the polar opposite of the experience of your home’s vibes — the yin to your home’s design vibe yang, if you will — then you’ll love what we have in store for you today.
Let’s talk about feng shui, the ancient art of placement. We often talk about how to refresh your home and the role design plays in not only the experience of the places in which you live but also your experience of yourself and your mental and spiritual health. Simply put, feng shui is the OG of intentionally honoring and addressing your mental and spiritual health through design.
Feng shui is paradoxically simple and also hyper-specific. (Or perhaps that’s less a paradox and more, poetically, a balance.) It’s been around for thousands of years and is a vast world to explore. Today, we’ll simplify things and offer you the basics of feng shui, how it works in your home, what it means for the fabrics you choose for your furniture, and more.
Feng Shui Design Simplified: A Quick Look At The Basics
It’s About Flow
First, a few basic terms. At the heart of feng shui is the notion of “chi,” the belief that there is an energy that dwells in all things. That energy can flow freely or become blocked and stuck in some way. Free-flowing energy leads to a more positive, harmonious experience of all things and life itself. Blocked energy leads to a blocked life.
It’s About Balance
The blocking or flowing results from the way energies interact. You likely know the black-and-white Taoist symbol that looks a bit like two raindrops, one black and one white, swirling together in a circle, each with a spot of the other inside it.
This symbol represents the yin and yang, how things can be opposite without being oppositional. There’s a harmony and balance that opposites can offer one another, freeing life’s energies to flow.
It’s Elemental
Earth, fire, water, wood, and metal. No, that’s not an iconic R&B band before they removed a couple of members. Earth, fire, water, wood, and metal are the five elements central to feng shui. Part of bringing feng shui into your home involves those elements. That can be a literal thing, but it can also, as we’ll soon see, be achieved by bringing in colors and textures reflective of those elements.
And It Comes With a Map
One last piece we won’t go into in great depth about here — but we think it is pretty cool. When you’ve seen a design style that you’re particularly vibing with, have you ever wished someone would hand you a map or something that guides you on how to apply it in your home? Meet the “bagua map.”
Feng shui is fundamentally about what goes where. Bagua maps show the way. There are multiple approaches to bagua maps, but nine aspects of life are central to all that create a space’s energetic flow and balance.
Imagine sketching out your home’s floor plan (or a single room), then laying the map over it and addressing each area accordingly to promote the experience of an element/energy in areas like abundance, health, and knowledge.
Now, The Keys To Mastering Fabric Feng Shui for Your Home
Since we’re the largest furniture upholstery store online, fabrics are the “harmony” we bring to the feng shui conversation. So, let’s dig into the basics of utilizing feng shui in your home’s furniture, choosing fabrics that enhance and elevate the flow of your home.
- Fabrics
It likely won’t surprise you to learn that natural, non-toxic fibers are preferred whenever possible. Think here of cotton, silk, linen, and more because…
- Textures
Fabric textures feed a space’s energetic focus. For example, linen, silk, or crisp cotton support focus and clarity, while velvet, chenille, and others are used for spaces where softness and relaxation are the focus.
- Colors
For fabric and other decor color inspiration, we look to those five elements for guidance. Like earth (brown, rich yellow), fire (red, orange), water (blue, black), wood (green, teal), and metal (metallic, pastels).
- The Elephant
It’s not an actual elephant, more a pun on the elephant in the room. Yes, feng shui, at its most basic, it’s about the placement of things. And the placement of things begins with decluttering and simplifying your space. That — in and of itself — changes the fabric, texture, and color of the energy of a space. So start there.
Feng Shui Upholstery Fabric Ideas To Give Your Home a Whole New Flow
Let’s look at a few rooms and talk about upholstery fabrics with colors and textures that might best serve the feng shui needs of that space to help you start visualizing a new flow in your home.
Family room
A family or living room is a place to gather, connect, and relax. With that and feng shui in mind, fabrics for furniture may include tones like a deep royal blue (peace and calming). Or perhaps a sectional in a soft hunter green velvet (a color associated with family) or accent pieces or curtains in a salmon chenille or coral peach velvet, thought to encourage connection and conversation.
Bedroom
We’ll focus on the primary bedroom. Here, you’ll likely want energy associated with peacefulness and tones, like lavender linen or ochre gold velvet. Perhaps a space that fosters connection and love, like pink deluxe silk. Or maybe you’d simply like a sense of simplicity and balance, like snow white eco-friendly fabric or champagne beige chenille.
Home office
And who doesn’t need every bit of help they can get feeding the right energy in their home office? Here, feng shui embraces the symbolic energy of earthy browns (grounding), rich reds (power, energy), purple (wealth, harmony), and black (stillness, wisdom) — for starters.
So perhaps cinnamon brown chenille, burgundy red microfiber, orchid purple tweed, or caviar black chenille. And they don’t all need to be deep tones. Try a bright, energizing melon orange tweed.
You Can Do Fabric Feng Shui Your Way and Raise Your Home’s Style Vibe
Feng shui elevates the chi of your spaces through balance, focusing on the five elements and tools like the Bagua map. It’s part precision, part art. But there’s no one way to do it. There is, however, a variety of guidance from DIY and professional consultants to help you truly embrace the practice.
Like many other styles, it’s about what appeals to you. Unlike other design styles, the focus is on the energy first and adding to your spaces what fosters balance and frees the energy to flow — and your life along with it.
Fabrics feed the energetic needs of each room through the colors and textures you choose. As you get into your feng shui flow, we’re here with all the fabrics you could need and a passion for helping you cultivate the harmony you seek for your home.