Xuan Kong Feng Shui Part 16 - The Floor Layout

Xuan Kong Flying Star Feng Shui free tutorials

Part 16

Flying star chart and the floor layout

There are two methods to impose the flying star chart which you have just created onto the actual floor layout of a property. The traditional method is to divide your floor plan into 9 squares of 3 rows times’ 3 columns square. The more modernize and westernize method is to divide your floor plan into 8 equal sectors resembling a pie chart. There is no method that is more superior to the others; both methods have its pros and cons. If you have watched some Kung Fu movies, you would have realized that the traditional Chinese house is very squarish in design with its rooms separated into squarish cubicles. That, I believe is the reasons why the traditional method of imposing the flying star chart had came along.

The 8 Pie Sector Method

I want to describe only the 8 pie sector method because I prefer this method over the other and the reason is because this method is more scientifically satisfying. This method also eliminates a lot of debating question mark. The 8 sector method does have its cons but I would personally classify them as very minimal.

Center of the property

First of all, you will need to determine the center of your property. If the layout of the property to be audit is squarish, we would just draw two lines from across the corners of the layout and take the intersections of the lines as the center. As the architects and designers all have ideas of their own and wanted to distinguish them from each another, we have many irregular floor plans today. Many people including me have pondered over the question of ‘what do you mean center?’ My preferred method is simple; the center of the property is the gravitational center. Here is how I do it.

You need your floor plan of course, for those who doesn’t have a ready floor plan, get yourself a measuring tape, pencils, and some papers and do the sketching yourself. The precision of the measuring tape is measured in centimeters, which is good enough. Some practitioner use laser meter and there are some very sophisticated practitioners using very advanced equipments like total station and theodolite. (They are not primary designed for Feng Shui) Well, do people have all this equipments in the past? So just get to work with a measuring tape and a compass. If you are sketching for your own floor plan, just be sure that it is drawn to scale.

After you obtain an architect drawing or a self sketch floor plan, cut them out following the perimeter of your floor plan. Glue your floor plan cut out onto a cardboard. Cut the cardboard to shape by following the shape of your floor plan. (Or simply just sketch the floor plan onto the cardboard itself and cut it to shape.) Suspend your cardboard with a plum line (a string tie with a weight on one end) on each corner or edge of the cut out. (Or at least with two corners) There will only be one intersection where these lines meet and that is your gravitational center. Refer to the diagrams below.

Aligning with the Magnetic North

Now you have located your center of your floor plan, you will need to divide them into 8 equal sectors. What we have just done is only to locate the center of your property. We now step away from the paper craft that you have just created. Physically, you need to locate that center of your property. There are a few methods, usually a traditional Feng Shui compass will have a square base, and practitioners can directly align the compass against the walls or doors to locate their directions. Assuming that you are using a normal compass, so one method is to locate a datum corner with some references corner and tape that corner to the center or your property. Refer to diagram below.

After you have physically crawl the floor plan, now we come back to the paper cut out, place your compass on the center of the paper cut out that was derived earlier on and align them with the datum angle. (The reference angle is for counter checking) Divide them into 8 sectors of 45 degrees equally. Fill the numbers of the flying star chart into the floor plan. Here you go, it’s done. Refer to the diagram below.

Some common thoughts on the 8 pie method

This 8 pie method is more popular in Western countries and also in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Many practitioners are also starting to adopt this method. This method marks out the exact sector evenly base on angles thus is seem more logical in thoughts.

The most problematic thing about this method is that it usually divides an area of a property into 3 or 4 pieces, making it very hard arrange the furniture. This method cannot, or make it unrealistic to perform small ‘Taiji’ (a micro view on each room) on each sector. This method creates 8 sectors rather then the traditional 9 squares, thus making the amount of the covered area in the center palace inconsistent.