Home office feng shui
A desk is a small architecture. Where it faces decides whether the day feels exposed or held, and the tradition’s answer is the one it gives for the bed, with light added. The four conditions and the order to give them up in; the light across the page; what the camera sees on a call; the air in a closed room; the scholar’s studio the rule descends from; and how to keep work out of the bed.
Oriented NW 315°
Metal
The home office is the room feng shui was not written for and fits best. Its whole concern is a person sitting still for hours in a fixed relationship to a door, a window and a wall, which is exactly what the tradition has always been about. Read the desk the way you would read the bed, add the light, and most of the decisions make themselves; the ones that do not are the compromises, and the tradition has an order for those too.
Where the desk faces
The command position applies to the desk as it does to the bed: a solid wall behind you, the door in view, and your body out of the door’s direct line. The difference is that at a desk you are awake and working, so a fourth condition enters, the light, and it should come from the side. Four conditions, then, and the drawing gives the three arrangements a room usually offers.
Position A has everything: the chair against the wall, the desk in front of it, the door in sight and out of line, the window to the side. Position B, the desk against the wall with the door behind, is the arrangement most people fall into because it puts the desk out of the way; it is the arrangement the tradition names as the worst, and anyone who has worked with their back to an open door knows why. Position C, facing the wall with the door to one side, is a compromise, workable if the door is visible with a turn of the head and the wall in front is not a hand’s width from the face.
Where a room cannot give all four, give them up in this order. The diagonal first: a desk in the door’s line with a wall behind is better than a desk at a perfect angle with a window at its back. The view second: if the only wall puts the door behind, keep the wall and hang a small mirror at the side of the screen, angled so that the door is in it. The light third: a lamp can make side light where the window will not. The wall never: a desk that has to face a wall with the door behind it is a desk that should be somewhere else in the room, or in another room.
Light across the desk
Put the window to your side, not in front of you and not behind. From the front it lights your face and dazzles you; from behind it lights the screen and dazzles you the other way; from the side it lights the desk. If you write by hand, the tradition and every drawing teacher agree that the light should come from the side opposite the writing hand, so that the hand does not shadow the page: from the left for a right-hander. A screen wants the same thing for a different reason, that the window should be neither in front of it, where it is in the eye, nor behind it, where it is in the glass.
The three desks in the drawing share one window. In the first the window is at the sitter’s side and the light falls across the page; in the second the desk faces the window and the screen stands against the brightest thing in the room, so that the eye, adapted to the glass, reads the screen as dim; in the third the window is behind the sitter and appears in the screen as a veil over everything on it. The tradition’s reading and the lighting engineer’s coincide: side light on the work, no bright source in front of the eyes, nothing but wall behind the chair.
What the camera sees
The last decade added a witness to the tradition’s rule that nobody expected: the camera above the screen. A video call is a photograph of the desk from the other side, and it has the same preferences as the geomancer, for reasons of exposure rather than qi.
Against a wall the face takes the light from the side window and the background holds still, which is what a lens and a caller both want. Against a window the camera exposes for the brightest thing in the frame, the glass, and the face goes dark, a silhouette against a white rectangle, which is why the first thing a photographer does with a backlit subject is turn them round. With the door behind, every person who passes or enters appears over the sitter’s shoulder, and the sitter, who cannot see them, learns of them from the faces on the screen. The three drawings are the command position’s three conditions photographed from the other side of the desk, and they are the reason a reader who has never heard of the Black Tortoise has probably already moved the desk.
What is in front of you
Beyond the desk there should be room: a clear stretch of floor or wall rather than a bookcase a hand’s width from your face. The tradition calls the open space in front of a position its ming tang, the bright hall, and reads it as room for thought. Designers say the same thing in terms of visual rest: eyes that focus on a screen at half a metre need somewhere further away to go, and a wall at arm’s length gives them nothing. Meyers-Levy and Zhu found that people in rooms with higher ceilings thought more freely and in rooms with lower ones more concretely; the finding is about height, but the intuition it confirms, that the space in front of the eyes shapes the kind of thinking done in it, is the ming tang’s.
The room’s edges
Corners of furniture aimed at the sitter, a beam across the desk, a door that opens into your shoulder, a shelf over the head: the tradition files these under sha qi, and the remedy in each case is to move or to soften. Round the corner that points at you, or turn the piece. Shift the desk so the beam runs beside it rather than across it. Rehang the door or move the chair. Take the shelf down from over the head, or move what is heavy on it to the floor. The beams and corners guide draws each case; at a desk the test is the bed’s test, made sitting up.
The air in a closed room
A home office is the room in the house most often used with the door shut, for quiet, and a shut room with a person in it fills with carbon dioxide faster than most people expect. Allen and colleagues, in 2016, put office workers through a week of days in rooms ventilated to different standards and found their scores on decision-making tasks roughly doubled between the worst air and the best, with carbon dioxide and ventilation rate the variables that moved. The tradition asks every room for two ends, a way for air to enter and a way for it to leave, and for a window that opens; the home office needs the rule more than any other room because it is the one where the door is closed all day. What the study changed was the ventilation of a sealed laboratory office, on twenty-four people over six days, and not a window: it shows that the air in a shut room is worth minding, not that a window on the latch reproduces its numbers. A window on the latch, the door open an inch or a fan in the wall is the cheapest way to mind it, and how much they do depends on the day outside. The windows guide draws the two ends.
Two desks
A couple working at home in one room have the command position twice, and one wall. The workplaces guide draws the three ways two desks can share a room: back to back with a screen between the chairs, so that each has something solid behind and both see the door; side by side against one wall, sharing it; and face to face, which puts each in the other’s line all day and is the one the tradition and the seating research both refuse. The second and the third are what a shared room falls into by default, and the first is the one to plan for.
Work apart from rest
The strongest advice the tradition gives about a home office is not about the office at all: keep it out of the bedroom. Work is yang and sleep is yin, and a room that tries to be both does neither. If a bedroom must hold a desk, the tradition asks for a screen or a curtain between them, for the desk to be covered at night, and for the screen to go dark. The sleep research would add: the screen out of the room altogether, since a lit screen in the evening is the single best-documented thing that delays sleep, and a desk in a bedroom is a screen in a bedroom.
The scholar’s studio
The desk has a longer history in the tradition than the bathroom or the sofa, because the classical house had one room that was about sitting still with a purpose: the scholar’s studio. The Ming manuals of taste, of which Wen Zhenheng’s Treatise on Superfluous Things of the 1620s is the most read, give the studio its own chapters: a quiet room away from the household’s noise, clean, bright but not exposed, with a window for the light and a view of something, a courtyard tree or a rock, for the eye to rest on, and a desk placed for the light with few things on it, each chosen. Clunas’s study of the treatise reads it as a manual of status as much as of taste, which it was; it is also the first Chinese text to describe the room this page is about, and its preferences, quiet, light from the side, a view, a clear desk, are the ones the tradition and the research arrive at from their different directions.
Reading the desk
The tests, in the order the tradition would make them:
- What is behind the chair? A wall, or a high-backed chair against one. Not a window, not a door, not the open room.
- Can you see the door? Without turning the body. If not, a small mirror beside the screen, angled at the door, is the compromise.
- Are you in the door’s line? If the desk sits where the door’s swing and sight line run, move it off by a metre.
- Where is the light? At the side, from the side opposite the writing hand. Never in front of the screen, never behind it.
- What is in front of you? Floor, or wall at a distance, not a bookcase at arm’s length.
- What points at you? A corner, a beam, a shelf over the head. Turn, move or take it down.
- Does the air change? A window that opens, or a door on the latch, in a room that is shut all day.
- Can the room be left? A lamp that goes off, a cloth over the desk, a door that closes: the edge of the day, drawn.
Most rooms pass five or six. The drawing at the top of the page is the room that passes all eight, and it is smaller than it looks.