The Feng Shui Apartment Alteration on West 67th Street, New York City

The Harmonious Rationale for a Feng Shui Alteration

This high-rise apartment occupies a 1,600 square foot corner site with mesmerizing, panoramic views of the city, park, and river. It is in New York’s Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side in a prominent and prestigious Post-War high-rise condo building.

The clients, an international couple who has lived in many locations around the world, envisioned a living environment designed according to Feng Shui principles. Their commitment to Feng Shui influenced the selection of the apartment, as well as informed the alteration program for the two-bedroom, three-full bath unit.

Feng Shui design dictated the orientation and functional layout of the apartment to harmonize with spiritual forces: the Yin and Yang and the flow of energies (Chi) that have positive and negative effects. Feng Shui also called for an abundance of natural ventilation and daylight throughout the apartment. Large floor-to-ceiling windows maintain a maximum amount of natural daylight while operable windows in the right locations allow for excellent airflow. To achieve ideal Feng Shui house proportions, the main living space is a well-proportioned rectangle within the square of the apartment’s overall footprint. In designing the spatial layout, geometries based on an eight-directional axis guided functional relationships within the apartment.

In accordance with the client’s beliefs, a welcoming mask floats in a northeast-facing, lit niche at the central axis of the apartment to protect the occupants from evil spirits. A desk placed in the apartment’s career sector faces the Hudson River, a moving water element at true North. The layout locates the master bedroom in the southwest quadrant for strength in love and marriage and situates the parents/guest bedroom along the northwest axis for mentors/helpful people.

The plan creates generous, open, and clutter-free spaces, as small, closed dark areas restrict the flow of positive energy. The master bedroom suite, open most of the time, can be closed off for privacy from visitors by a hidden operable panel, conceal-hinged to the hallway wall. The den area can be separated from the main living/dining areas into a bedroom to house additional guests with a series of three interlocked translucent sliding panels that span twenty-six feet. When not needed, the panels stack neatly and unobtrusively at the entry.

The lighting scheme enhances spatial qualities and helps define functions. Lowered ceilings at the entry hall, the kitchen, all bathrooms, the bedroom hallway, and across the main living area accommodate structural beams, pipes, electrical conduits, mechanical ducts and sliding panel tracks with heavy-duty steel supports. At the transitions between ceiling heights, wall-mount soffit knife-edge coves with integrated LED strip lights become a visual highlight and define the large open rectangular public space. A hovering infinity corner plane defines the end point of the rectangle. Inside the kitchen and bathrooms, backlit dropped ceilings at the rear walls visually heighten the spaces while providing a warm glow. Continuous recessed slot LED light fixtures and sets of four trimless recessed lights visually separate the living and dining areas.

The clients wanted the existing kitchen—open to the center of the main living area—to be relocated and hidden from sight. Pre-construction investigative probes located pipes in a building chase with sufficient space to allow for a new, efficient, walk-through galley kitchen with direct access to the dining area. Feng Shui prohibits placing fire and water elements opposite each other; this dictated the offset positioning of the sink and cooktop in the kitchen. A dry-bar off the main living area acts as a wine bar and auxiliary servery space when entertaining.

The design eliminates unnecessary door trims and applied wall bases to create a visually clutter-free environment. A floating wall base and flush full-height trimless doors enhance the feeling of verticality. An abundance of storage and closets further enables a visually clean, relaxing environment. Every inch of space is functional; a wall corner at the end of the dry-bar becomes an office closet, housing a slide-out printer/fax machine, stationary, pens, and file storage. The seamless integration of intelligent technology enables the monitoring and remote programming of heating and cooling, lighting, data systems, and window shades to manage fluctuating interior conditions.

Clean, minimal design and transcendental, elemental Feng Shui purity shape an interplay of light, form, and material for a functional, inspirational, and spiritually satisfying living space.