Harmonizing your home: how to design a staircase

 

A project of a staircase is always a typical Feng Shui case for harmonizing your home.

To get a good harmony inside the home there should be a balance in the circulation of energy (qi in Chinese), avoiding to take directions which produce a build-up in some spots and a lack in other ones.

 

For that reason we need to plan with accuracy the paths for either leading ‘qi’ and people to different floors, as staircases, or from a room to another, as corridors and entrances.

Modern architecture has partially solved the problem creating the so-called ‘open spaces’, which bring in more light and space thanks to the elimination of partition walls, though there are some drawbacks as  the difficulty to arrange spaces when they are too wide, a higher risk of cluttering up some rooms and more lack of privacy.

The design of inside and outside staircases has always been a complex problem, involving not only technical and aesthetic matters but also safety, so we really need a proper solution to avoid disharmony in our home.

According to Feng Shui, you cannot achieve a good level of harmony if the qi drifts too suddenly from a room into another: for instance it is considered a bad positioning of a staircase when its entrance is lined up with the entrance door.

If we want to lessen the impact of an inside staircase we have to keep in mind several aspects, since its presence represents a gap on the horizontal flow of qi: an upward and downward movement is always a critical stage, as it performs a change from an horizontal to a vertical plane. A narrow spiral staircase produces

The wider the staircase, the easier for the qi to keep a slow and winding movement, so we can get a better circulation of the qi itself and have more safety too. This implies to design short stairs, to build with softer material as wood or to use carpets and moquettes in order to slow up the qi and, most of all, to give the staircase a wide and little sharp-edged form, avoiding hard and high banisters that cut the qi and and don’t let the light trough.

Harmonizing your home: an optimal solution for the running of the qi through a staircase.

Harmonizing your home: an optimal solution for the running of the qi through a staircase.

A key point for harmonizing your home is designing with accuracy staircases, corridors and entrances, avoiding dark corners and unused spaces from the one hand, and difficult passages from the other hand. So please pay attention also to illumination, to the entrance of your staircase and to its shape.

Harmonizing your home: this is a well-illuminated and spacious staircase.

Harmonizing your home: this is a well-illuminated and spacious staircase.