Rooms · Arrive · 12 min read · Updated September 2026

The entrance

The mouth of qi, in the tradition’s phrase. The door through which everything comes in, the threshold the tradition raised and guarded, the first few steps inside it and what those steps should be furnished for, with the heights the joiners and the access codes give, and what the housing research says about a watched door.

Oriented E 078°

Wood

Fig. 01 A door, a wall, and a clear floor. The tradition asks for nothing more at the threshold, and nothing less.

The front door is where feng shui begins, in both senses. Classical siting read a house from its facing direction, which the door usually fixed, and the modern Western school lays its whole map over the plan from the wall that holds it. Whatever the school, the entrance is treated as the place where the outside becomes the inside, and it is asked to do that job clearly: room to stop, light to arrive by, and nothing in the way. This page gives the threshold the tradition built, the bright hall inside it, the heights that furnish it, and the research that agrees.

The threshold the tradition built

The Chinese door had a sill. The threshold, menkan, was a beam of timber or stone laid across the opening, a hand or more high, that had to be stepped over and never stood on; a person who stood on the threshold, the manuals and the grandmothers agreed, stood on the house’s neck. It kept the water and the dust out, it kept the household’s luck in, and it marked, with a step of the foot, the moment at which the outside became the inside. Above the leaves were pasted the door gods at New Year, and on the leaves the knockers and the studs that told the rank of the house; inside, a few paces in, stood the spirit screen the front door guide describes, which stopped the line from the door and gave the entrance its turn. Knapp’s survey of the folk beliefs of the house records the sill, the gods and the screen from province to province, and the modern entrance keeps all three in other forms: the mat is the sill, the lamp is the guard, and the console or the plant in the door’s line is the screen.

The bright hall

Just inside the door there should be space: a clear area of floor where a person can stop, close the door, put something down and see where to go. The tradition calls this the ming tang, the bright hall, borrowing the name of the open court in front of a classical building, and reads it as the place where qi collects before it moves through the house. The designer reads it as the difference between a hallway and a corridor.

Plan 01 Inside the door: room to stop, the line through the house broken, and the furniture of arrival The front door opens at the bottom. The dashed circle is the ming tang, the bright hall, kept clear. The ghosted line from the door to the window opposite is the line through the house; the plant stands in it and breaks it. On the right, a console with a lamp and a mirror on the side wall; on the left, a seat and hooks. The ghosted bathroom door at the far end is the first thing the tradition does not want a visitor to see.

The line through the house

Stand in the doorway and look straight ahead. If you see a window or a back door, the tradition reads a straight line through the house along which qi enters and leaves without stopping, the through house, chuan tang, and it asks for something to interrupt the line: a rug, a table, a change of floor, a plant, a screen. This is the one entrance rule that sounds most mystical and translates most directly: a house you can see straight through feels like a passage rather than a place, and the draught agrees. The windows guide draws the same line inside a single room, and the courtyard house answered it with a wall.

What you see first

The first thing visible from the door sets the tone of the house, and the tradition asks that it be deliberate: not the kitchen, not a bathroom door, not the bedroom, not the bin. If the plan gives no choice, the advice is to close the doors that can be closed and to give the eye something else to land on, a picture with depth in it, a lamp, a plant, a wall of colour at the end of the view. The manuals’ list of things not to see first is long; the principle behind it is short. What is seen from the door is what the house is taken to be.

Fig. 02 What faces the front door, in four small halls with the door at the bottom of each. A: a solid wall opposite the door with a picture and a lamp on it, something to arrive at. B, ghosted: a mirror facing the door, which the manuals read as sending the arrival straight back out. C, ghosted: a toilet door in line with the entrance, the first door a visitor sees. D, ghosted: a window or a back door straight ahead, the line the tradition calls piercing the hall. The dashed line is the sight line from the threshold. The tradition wants it to end at something solid and pleasant within a few metres; the three ghosted halls end it at a reflection, a toilet and the outside.

The four halls in the drawing are the four ways the sight line from the threshold can end. The manuals want it to end at something solid and pleasant within a few metres: a wall with a picture, a lamp lit on arrival, a table for the keys. They read a mirror opposite the door as sending the arrival straight back out, a toilet door as the wrong first thing to see, and a window or a back door straight ahead as the line they call piercing the hall, through which qi and the visitor’s attention leave without stopping. Each has a remedy of a metre or two: move the mirror to a side wall, keep the toilet door closed and paint it to disappear, put a plant or a curtain in the window’s line.

Furnished for arrival

Fig. 03 The entrance in section, with the heights that furnish it for arrival. The door opens inward onto a mat, and beside it, at a hundred and ten centimetres, the switch a hand finds in the dark. A bench at forty-five, the height of a chair, for the shoes; above it the hooks at a hundred and sixty-five, where a coat hangs clear of the seat and a tall person’s eye is not in the pegs. On the other side a console at eighty-five, thirty deep, for the keys and the post, with a lamp on it that is the entrance’s own light; and above the console a mirror whose top is at two metres, so that the tallest person in the house sees their whole head in it, on the side wall and not facing the door. The person arriving is a metre seventy, and everything is within their reach from the mat. The heights are the joiners’ and the access codes’: a switch between forty-five and a hundred and twenty from the floor, a seat at forty-five, a worktop or console at eighty-five to ninety, hooks at a hundred and sixty to a hundred and seventy for adults with a second row at a metre for children. The tradition adds only the order: mat, light, a place to put things down, and nothing in the line of the door.

The section gives the entrance its heights, and the heights are the joiners’ and the access codes’ rather than the tradition’s, which asked only for the order. A mat inside the door marks the threshold and changes the floor. The switch is by the door at a hundred and ten centimetres, where a hand finds it in the dark, and the lamp it lights is the entrance’s own. A bench at forty-five, the height of a chair, takes the shoes, and hooks at a hundred and sixty-five, with a second row at a metre where there are children, take the coats above it. A console at eighty-five, thirty deep, takes the keys and the post and carries the lamp; above it, on the side wall and never facing the door, a mirror whose top is at two metres shows the tallest person in the house their whole head. Panero and Zelnik give the reach behind each figure: a standing hand rests at a metre, the eye at a metre sixty, a coat’s shoulder on a hook clears a seated head at a hundred and sixty-five. A plant stands in the line from the door to the window and breaks it. Outside, a pair of plants at the sides of the door and a light over it do the same job in the other direction, and the outside page draws the approach.

Evidence · Legibility, control and the watched door

There is no study of entrances and fortune. There is Lynch’s legibility, the quality of a place that tells a person where they are and where to go next; Evans’s finding that a sense of control over one’s surroundings is one of the things that protects mental health in housing; and Newman’s study of public housing, which found that the entrances residents watched and kept were the ones that were visible from the flats they served, shared by few, and marked off from the street by a step, a gate or a change of surface, while the anonymous lobby was the one nobody owned. An entrance with room to stop, light to see by, a place for the keys and a threshold a visitor pauses at is legible, controllable and watched in exactly the sense all three mean, and the tradition arrived at it by another route.

Facing direction

The direction the door faces is the facing of the house in Compass practice, and its opposite is the sitting. Everything in the Compass schools starts from these two bearings, and the guide to finding the facing shows how to take them and what to do when the door is not on the facing side. On this site we use them 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 and a bright hall in the literal sense. The directions pages say what each facing tends to mean for light.

In order

The entrance is the first room the tradition reads and the easiest to put right, because almost everything in it is movable. Clear the floor first; the clutter guide begins at the door for this reason. Then light, then the seat and the console, then whatever breaks the line to the window, then the mirror on the side wall. The door itself, its size, colour and swing, is the subject of the front door guide, which draws the threshold from the outside in.