Front Door

Every room of the house keeps one thing. The bedroom keeps rest; the home office keeps work; the living room keeps gathering; the kitchen keeps nourishment. The front door keeps the coming and going — it is the one place where the house and the world formally meet, and in the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition laid out in What Is Feng Shui, what passes through it is qi itself. The trade’s name for the door is qi kou (气口, “mouth of qi”): the opening through which the dwelling takes in what it lives on. This page reads the mouth — which way it faces, what it opens onto, and the buffer set just inside it.