Kitchen

The kitchen is the one room whose whole business is food — and in the tradition food was never just meals, it was lu (禄, “salary, earnings”). The bedroom keeps rest; the home office keeps work; the living room keeps gathering; the kitchen keeps nourishment. In the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition — the branch of feng shui that reads the living house, laid out in What Is Feng Shui — it is also the one room that keeps a live flame year-round, and that flame gives the room its protagonist: the stove is the dwelling’s huo kou (火口, “fire mouth”). Everything a kitchen is asked to do follows from it.