Guides · Entrance · 12 min read · Updated September 2026

Front door feng shui

The mouth of qi, in the tradition’s phrase, and the one place where every school starts. The gate of the courtyard house and the screen behind it, what the door should open onto and what should not face it, the approach outside, the carpenter’s ruler that sized the opening, and what the research on thresholds says.

Oriented S 180°

Fire

Fig. 01 A doorway with light at the end of it. The tradition asks that the door be found easily, open fully, and give onto a clear floor.

The front door is where a reading begins in every school. The Compass schools take the building’s facing from it; the Black Sect lays its whole grid from it; the Form school asks what it opens onto and what runs at it. The manuals call it the mouth of qi, qi kou, and all three schools want the same mouth: easy to find, easy to open, lit, and giving onto a clear piece of floor before the house begins. This guide takes the door from the street inward, and ends with the ruler the carpenters used to size it.

The gate of the courtyard house

The door the tradition was written for was a gate. A Beijing courtyard house, the siheyuan, presented a blank wall to the lane and one opening in it, and the opening was not in the middle of the wall but at its south-east corner, because a house that sat north and faced south was, in the Eight Mansions reckoning, a Kan house whose best direction was Xun, the south-east, and the gate went where the best direction was. The gate itself was graded by rank: the grandest kind, with its doors set back under a full bay of roof, belonged to officials, and lesser households had the doors set further forward, until the plainest kind, the ruyi gate, was a door in a wall with a carved lintel. Two stones shaped like drums stood either side, a raised sill of stone or timber crossed the threshold, and at New Year the door gods were pasted on the leaves.

Outside: the approach

The tradition reads the door from the street inward. A path that curves toward the door is preferred to one that runs straight at it; a door at the end of a straight road, a T-junction or a long drive is read as facing a rushing approach and asked for something to slow it, a hedge, a change of paving, a turn. A lamp post, a tree or the corner of a neighbouring building aligned with the door is read as a sha, a cutting line, and the outside page reads the whole plot on the same principle.

Fig. 01 Four things outside a front door, drawn in plan with the house wall at the top, the door in it, and the street below. A: a road running straight at the door, the T-junction the manuals name first, with a hedge across the front and the path bent to meet it. B: a door facing a neighbour’s door across a narrow lane, with a screen or a plant beside one of them. C: the corner of the building opposite pointing at the door, with planting in its line. D: a lamp post or a tree on the door’s axis, with the path moved to one side. The ghosted arrow is the line the tradition reads as an arrow. None of the four can usually be removed; each can be interrupted, and the drawings show the interruption the manuals recommend, which is also what a landscape designer would draw.

The four situations in the drawing are the ones the manuals list, and each has a remedy that a landscape designer would draw without knowing the word sha. A road that runs at the door is met with a hedge and a path that bends to reach the door from the side. Doors that face across a lane get a screen or a plant beside one of them. A corner pointed at the door gets planting in its line. A post or a tree on the door’s axis cannot usually be moved, so the path is, and the door is approached from one side of it.

Inside: the bright hall

Plan 02 The threshold: the bright hall, and the line through the house The front door opens at the bottom onto a clear floor, the ming tang. Straight ahead, a window on the far wall makes a line through the house; the tradition reads it as qi entering and leaving without stopping. A console and a rug (solid) turn the line; the ghosted coat rack a step inside the door is the blockage the tradition asks to remove.

The plan gives the bright hall its shape. A door that opens onto a clear floor, with the coats out of the line and the way onward visible, is the tradition’s mouth and the designer’s entrance room at once; the ghosted rack a step inside the door, or a stair landing on the threshold, is the arrangement both dislike, and the entrance page shows what can be done with it in a narrow house.

The line through the house

Stand in the doorway and look straight ahead. If you see a window, a back door or a balcony, the tradition reads a line along which qi enters and leaves without stopping, the piercing hall, chuan tang, and it asks for something to turn it: a console, a rug, a plant, a screen, a change of floor. Of all the entrance rules this is the one that translates most directly. A house you can see straight through reads as a passage, not a place, and the piece that interrupts the line is the piece that makes the hall a room. The hallways page draws the line and the route through the house that the tradition wants instead.

What should not face the door

A mirror directly opposite the front door is disliked by every school: the tradition reads it as sending what enters straight back out, and the designer notices that the first thing a guest sees is themselves. A bathroom door, a kitchen or a bedroom in direct view of the entrance are read as private things made public; the remedies are to keep those doors closed and to give the eye something else, a picture, a lamp, a wall of colour. A staircase that lands facing the door is read as qi running up and out, and asked for a turn or a rug at its foot. The mirrors guide gives the mirror rule its exceptions.

The door itself

The tradition’s demands are physical. The door should open fully and inward, on hinges that work, without scraping or sticking; a door that cannot open wide is read as a mouth that cannot breathe. It should be solid rather than glazed, or at least not entirely transparent. It should be the largest door of the house, or feel it, and it should be the one used: a household that always enters through the garage is read as having no front door at all. Wong adds that the door should be in proportion to the house, neither a mean door in a large wall nor a grand one in a cottage, and that two front doors are one too many.

Fig. 03 The Lu Ban ruler, the carpenter’s measure: forty-two point nine centimetres divided into eight, wealth, illness, parting, justice, office, robbery, harm and root, four auspicious and four not, repeating along the tape. A door was sized so that its clear opening fell in an auspicious segment, and so were a bed, a table and a coffin. Four common door widths are marked where they fall on the scale: the 762 millimetre door of a small English house falls in harm; the 813 and the 838, the common internal and front door sizes, fall in root; the 914 falls in illness. A hand’s breadth moves a door from one segment to the next, and whether the measure is taken across the clear opening or the frame varies by manual, which is why the carpenters kept the ruler and let the theory look after itself. The names and the length follow Ruitenbeek’s study of the Lu Ban jing, the fifteenth-century carpenters’ manual, and the scale is still printed, in red for the auspicious segments and black for the others, on tape measures sold in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The ruler for the yin house, the Ding Lan ruler of 38.8 centimetres in ten, is not drawn.

The manuals also sized it. The carpenters’ classic, the Lu Ban jing of the fifteenth century, carries the ruler named after the trade’s patron: a length of forty-two point nine centimetres divided into eight segments, four auspicious and four not, repeating along the tape, against which the clear opening of a door was set so that it fell on wealth, justice, office or root and not on illness, parting, robbery or harm. Ruitenbeek’s study of the manual shows the ruler in use for doors, beds, tables and coffins, and tape measures sold in Hong Kong and Taiwan still print it beside the centimetres. The drawing marks four common door widths on it; a reader with a tape can measure their own, and the guide’s advice is to enjoy the result and not to move the frame.

Facing direction

The direction the door faces is usually the facing of the house in compass terms, and its opposite is the sitting; where the door is on the side of the house or at the back, the facing is the open elevation and not the door, and the facing guide says how to decide and how to take the bearing. On this site the facing is used descriptively: a north-facing door means a shaded threshold and a house that opens away from the sun; a south-facing door, the classical ideal, means light on the step. Stand in the open doorway looking out and take a compass reading; the Bagua explorer will follow the phone’s compass and name the sector.

Checklist

The door can be found from the street, is distinguished from the wall and is lit at night
The approach turns or slows before the door: a gate, a step, a change of surface
The door opens fully and the floor inside it is clear for a pace and a half
No mirror, bathroom or bedroom in direct view; no stair landing on the threshold
The line from door to far window is turned by a console, rug or screen, the household’s spirit screen
The front door is the door the household actually uses, and there is only one of it
Measured on the Lu Ban ruler, if only for the pleasure of knowing