THE RULES OF STAIRS: Poison arrows, crystals, & more

I have to admit that I’m not really a subscriber of Feng Shui. It seems to employ a threatening kind of reasoning: if you don’t make (at times, drastic) changes to the physical arrangement of your immediate surroundings you’ll be ‘punished’ with a loss of energy or health or wealth or whatnot. Maybe I’m being a little reactionary to my superstition-filled upbringing but Feng Shui seems a bit passive aggressive.

Recently though, I found Stairway Feng Shui Rules and couldn’t stop reading about the many DOs and DON’Ts of stairway Feng Shui. Some of the rules are pretty absurd (“Red carpets should never adorn staircases as they resemble blood flowing down.”) but some are really entertaining, especially when they use blanket statements to judge different types of stairs (“Curved staircases are best. Spiral staircases, resembling corkscrews boring into a house, are the worst.”). Other rules are just plain bad advice if you live in an earthquake-prone region like we do (“She [the best-selling authority on Feng Shui] also lines her stairs with bookcases that feature, (what else?), her books”).

Either way, I like to see that we here at Stairwell’s (and the artists we’ve been so lucky to work with) are not the only ones obsessing over stairs these days. [CL]