Eastern Exposure

Feng shui wasn’t in Joy Wolfe’s vocabulary until some clients asked her to consult the ancient Chinese philosophy of placement in the redesign of a home they were buying in Sierra Madre.

They didn’t personally believe that the placement of the doors or inclusion of sharp corners, for example, would create negative energy. But they feared that bad feng shui might hurt their home’s resale value since it is located in a community with a large Asian American population, explained Wolfe, owner of Designed With Joy Interiors in La Canada.

Wolfe rushed out and got some books on the 2,000-year-old Chinese school of thought, which is based on a complex philosophy for creating harmony between people and their environment. Later, she enrolled in a course on feng shui offered by the Pasadena branch of the American Society of Interior Designers.

“It’s a good theory or philosophy,” she said. “And I think you need to know what you might come up against.”

Wolfe’s experience is increasingly common here in California, where a vast network of trade and immigration ties with Asia and an acceptance of new ideas have created fertile territory for this Chinese practice.

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Business people attending the recent Pacific Resources real estate conference at the Regent Beverly Wilshire were offered a pre-breakfast seminar on feng shui along with sessions on “Securitization, Pension Funds & Real Estate” and “Real Estate Opportunities in Asia.”

“Anything alternative and from the East usually starts here,” said James Moser, president of Feng Shui Warehouse, a San Diego company offering training, reading materials and products related to feng shui.

Warehouse’s products range from Tibetan wind chimes to table-top fountains (based on the belief that water flow will “help the money flow”). They’re sold at the company store or through a mail-order catalog with a national mailing list of 25,000. Warehouse also publishes a feng shui magazine called Feng Shui, the journal.

There are various schools of feng shui, some of which offer courses and certification. There are also feng shui consultants who specialize in designing a healthy home or garden, rearranging your office for maximum profitability or balancing your menu to enhance your “chi,” or energy.

Moser is the organizer of the second annual Feng Shui Conference in Palm Springs on Oct. 10-13.

Steven Ehrlich, an award-winning Santa Monica architect who describes himself as an “architectural anthropologist,” said designers in Southern California should be knowledgeable about feng shui, given the region’s strong Asian cultural influence.

“This is a very real belief

system and something to deal with,” he said.

Ehrlich recently worked with several feng shui masters in designing a home in Diamond Bar for a couple from Taiwan.

“Feng shui had definite and direct formal applications on our design, from the orientation of the front door to where the stairways faced or didn’t face,” said the principal of Steven Ehrlich Architects, which was selected to design the DreamWorks SKG Animation Studios in Glendale.

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Not all Chinese subscribe to this ancient philosophy. During the design of a 2-million-square-foot civic center project in Taichung, Taiwan, Ehrlich’s firm proposed consulting a feng shui master.

“The project was very much infused with an ‘East meets West’ kind of philosophy, but our Asian partners specifically did not want to engage feng shui in the design,” he said.

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Evelyn Iritani can be reached by fax at (213) 237-7837 or by e-mail at [email protected]