A house is like a ship

Many people have difficulty determining the correct Facing side of a house.

Even where there appears to be no problem in determining the Facing side, sometimes people feel unsettled when they need to assess the interior placement of active and passive rooms.

This problem occurs when the Facing side is to one location of the house, the active rooms to the opposite side of the house.

Try not to look at a built structure too static. Instead, when assessing Facing and Sitting, look at a house as a living, moving, vehicle to Qi.

When you want to decide where the Facing side is, imagine your house to be a ship.

Look at this ship. It is oriented towards its front side, you wouldn’t expect it to be sailing backward. The bow is taken as the Facing. Furthermore, you would expect the bridge to be oriented into the same direction in which the ship’s bow is heading.

It is no different for a house. Look upon a house as a ship and ask yourself the question, where would your house be heading if it were a ship.

We would prefer a situation where our house will have its architectural front – bow – oriented towards the exterior Ming Tang, or Qi mouth, with its interior placements of active rooms (bridge, interior Ming Tang) to be located to the architectural front of the house.

Of course, where a ship’s bridge will be never oriented to face the stern, this could be different for houses, where some houses will have their interior Ming Tang away from the architectural front.

Houses with their interior Ming Tang away from the Facing side of the house, could be compared to a captain facing away from a ship's bow and towards the stern.

Houses with their exterior Ming Tang to the architectural back, could be compared by ships heading backward, or oriented away from the direction of the hull.

The Facing side of a house is defined as the side the building taps into Yang Qi most, as it indicates where the compass reading should be taken to determine the exact type of yang Qi the house is tapping into.

With Yang Qi, we refer to environmental Qi, not yang Qi in the sense of where we find human activity. We also do not refer to the location of the door as the door may or may very well not be into the same 45 degrees Palace as the Facing.

The Facing side has the Ming Tang and is the deciding factor, not the architectural front of a building, nor where the lay-out of the interior shows most activity.

It means each individual case needs looking into. Many factors decide the Facing and because of so many different architectural oddities, what may appear to be the architectural front may very well be the Sitting. This is most apparent in apartment buildings, where any one individual unit may have its own Facing, taken to be at the windows or balcony, while the building as a whole could have its architectural front away from this.

The situation may be again different for a single apartment unit with nothing more than a small outside window, as compared to a unit with full sliding doors and a balcony. The former will have the Facing at the door, the latter will have the Facing at the balcony.

Before we can continue our comparison between a house and a ship, we need to consider some orientations and placements.

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