Feng Shui for a Home Office

By Time Value

A home office has a problem that an office building does not: it shares a wall, a room or sometimes a desk with the rest of your life. The traditional guidance is unusually well suited to that situation, because most of it is about drawing a line between where you work and where you do everything else.

Here is the desk version of the placement rules, and the two things that tend to make a work corner feel workable.

Position the desk first

Placement decisions for a desk follow the same three conditions as the commanding position.

• Do not sit with your back to the door. This is the instruction people break most often when the desk has to go against the only available wall, and it is the one that tends to be noticed: a chair with an open doorway behind it is hard to settle into for long stretches.
• Have the entrance somewhere in view. If the desk cannot face the door, a mirrored monitor stand or an angled placement that puts the opening in peripheral vision is the common fallback. What is being asked for is that you can see someone arriving without turning.
• Back the chair with something solid. A wall, or a shelving unit you can see over. Open floor behind the chair is the arrangement most people notice as unsettled.

In a small flat, the honest answer is often that only two of the three can be had. Take the two that let you see the door.

Support and light

Two practical layers sit on top of placement.

Support. Beyond the wall behind you, a work corner benefits from an anchor — a bookcase, a filing cabinet, a solid desk rather than a folding table. The traditional reading is a settled position; the everyday reading is that a desk which does not wobble is easier to work at.

Light. Natural daylight is preferred, with warm light in the evening and, crucially, no habit of sitting with your back to an unshaded window for long periods. The tradition's objection is to glare and to a bright panel behind you; the practical one is that a screen is easier to read when the light source is not directly behind your head. Where daylight is not available, the usual advice is a warm-tone lamp positioned so it lights the desk rather than the wall behind you.

Balance the corner

Once the desk is placed, the guidance turns to what is in the immediate environment. The traditional framing is elemental: a working corner is conventionally given a little Wood — a plant, a natural surface — and a little Fire, usually read as warm light. Both are cheap, and both are easy to overdo.

What the same advice is usually guarding against is a corner that has become a storage heap. A desk that also holds a printer, three piles of paper and everything with no other home is a desk nobody wants to sit down at. If you want the general approach to clearing that, our guide to clutter in feng shui covers the room-by-room version, and the element associations behind plants and light are set out in five elements at home.

Keeping work and rest apart

The most distinctive piece of home-office advice is that the work corner should not share a room with sleep if it can be avoided at all. Where the room is shared, the workable compromise is a firm visual boundary: a screen, a divider, or at minimum a consistent habit of closing the laptop and clearing the desk surface at the end of the day.

This is the same principle that runs through our bedroom guide: the point is not that a desk carries any property, it is that a room which also holds your unfinished work tends to keep the work present. Putting a door, a screen or a closed lid between the two is the whole of the recommendation.

Frequently asked questions