Doors connect spaces and regulate the flow of energies in a building. These five essential feng shui tips will change how you think about the doors in your home forever.
Most people don’t think twice about doors. They use them to enter or exit buildings and rooms and close them when they want some privacy, quiet or security. But there is much more to doors than this.
Make sure all your doors can fully open
The external doors of a home, and especially the main front door, are the portals where energies as well as people enter a space. And internal doors affect the way that energies as well as people move from room to room. A good analogy is that corridors can be seen as the arteries of a home and doors are the valves that regulate the flow.
So a simple way to improve the flow of energy in your life is to make sure that all the doors in your home can open fully and are not obstructed by clutter or items of furniture.
Does this mean that it’s best to have all the doors in your home open all the time? No. The art is to get the right balance. Having too many open doors causes energy to move through too quickly, resulting in missed opportunities in life. Conversely, too little movement, such as rooms where the door is never or rarely opened, can cause stagnation that will be reflected in your life in some kind of stuckness.
Fix any doors that are difficult to open or close
Locks that need to be jiggled and doors that need to have force applied or special techniques used to open or close them results in corresponding frustrations in your life, and the more often you use the door, the greater the effect. The most important door to get right is your front door, so that entering and exiting is a frictionless experience.
Find somewhere else to hang your clothing
Coats, jackets, bathrobes and other types of clothing can often be found hanging on door hooks, especially in bathrooms, bedrooms, hall closets, and so on. These days you can even buy trendy over-door hangers that allow you to stash even more garments in this way.
If the door is never opened, or rarely opened, and it is being used as a wooden fixture to hang things from rather than for its original purpose, that’s fine. The problems start when it’s a door that is regularly in use. This is because the hanger may prevent the door from fully opening, and also the clothing adds weight, which translates into your life as requiring extra effort for whatever you do.
It’s fine to use a door hook on your bathroom door to hang your nightclothes or dressing gown while you’re bathing. Just don’t leave them hanging there all day.
Don’t hang what doesn’t need to be hung
Do you use your doors as a handy place to keep things you may want to use — aprons hanging on doors hooks in your kitchen or pantry, bags hanging on door hooks in other areas of your home, and so on? Remember that just because something CAN hang, it doesn’t mean to say that it has to. It makes a room look unnecessarily cluttered. Aprons and bags can be folded and stored in cupboards, and they are just as easy to access as they would be hanging on a hook.
Remove decorative items dangling from door handles
These types of items are perceived as beautifying a door in some way. But every time you open or close the door, it swings about and you have to manoeuvre around it. Energetically this translates into unnecessary complications in your life or self-sabotaging tendencies.
Depressed people tend to have many objects in their home that hang downwards rather than point upwards, which reflects how they feel inside, and door handle danglers is one of the tell-tale signs I always look for. This doesn’t mean that everyone who does this is depressed but it does usually indicate some kind of self-defeating mechanism.
Any suggestion to remove these items is usually met with resistance at first (‘Oh, but it looks so cute!’). But after a while you will discover how much easier it is to open and close your doors without them getting in the way and how much more smoothly your life proceeds too.
Copyright © Clear Space Living Ltd 2019, updated 2023
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I spoke with someone years ago that collected doors. She had them leaning against walls in her home. She thought it was great and asked me what I thought. What popped into my mind was that she wouldn’t know if she was coming or going in life. Karen, what do you think?
Hi Sue – I would have to visit the home, meet the person, and get to know them before I could comment on this.
Hi Karen
Does it matter if you rarely use your front door except for the postman or deliveries? We always use our back door and guests do too as it opens onto a gravelled area and drive. It’s old, a bit scruffy and needs replacing though!
Thanks x
PS really looking forward to your new books
Hi Cathryn – If you use your back door more than your front door, then for feng shui and space clearing purposes, your back door is your front door. There will be more information about this in Volume 1 of the new space clearing book my husband and I will be publishing later this year.
Sorry for my English! What I really would like to know is:
I decluttered my life and lived almost minimalistic. I lived a very peaceful live until my father died and my mother couldn’t live in the house anymore. They kept almost everything, even a lot of stuff from my grandparents. Why did I have to sort out (belongings of my mother) and declutter the whole big overstuffed house? I had to move a far distance and lived about two and a half jears in the house and sorted everything what my parents had left, and this was a lot. Why did I have to do all this? What does it mean on the energetic level? I lost a lot of money, because I could not have a job and do all this. Now I’m almost done, sell my parents house for my mother and move back and hopefully live a peaceful live again with only my belongings. Still will have to manage things for my narcissistic mother, who lives in a nursing home.
Greetings from Germany
Hi Elisabeth – Your question is a bit out of place here because it has nothing to do with doors, but I’ll answer it because it’s such an important topic.
Unfortunately, I hear similar stories all too often from people whose parents have left them a huge clutter problem to sort out. You can read more about this in these two articles:
The taboo topic of death clutter, and why we need to talk about it
Why life over 60 works better without clutter
If you had contacted me two and a half years ago, I would have suggested employing a professional clutter clearer to help you clear the property. It would have saved you so much time, it would have been worth it, even if you’d had to take out a loan based on the equity of the house to do it. There are certainly some sharks out there who prey on bereaved people and take advantage of them, so for anyone reading this post who is in a similar situation, be sure to use a consultant who is affiliated with a reputable organization.
For you now, it’s time to put this behind you and get on with your own life. If you need help with that, I suggest you book a Personal Insight session with my husband Richard.
Now that it’s done,
What about the door color? Is it good to have red front door or not? Some Feng Shui experts say it’s beneficial, others say it’s very bad. What is the truth?
It would be ludicrous for everyone in the world to paint their front door a certain colour because it’s “good feng shui”. What needs to be understood here is that there is no one-size-fits-all. Feng shui always needs to be expertly tailored to each individual property and its occupants. So for some properties and people, red would be a wonderful front door colour. For others, it would be a terrible choice.
Wow. i was taught that all doors should remain open to allow energy to circulate w/ ease. i always block my bedroom door, wondered abt it TODAY, and clicked. i keep my toilet lid down bc: germs & snakes (seriously, learned that the hard way). i love handle decos, but see your point! i MUST disagree on wind chimes. If You LOVE it, (i LOVE the sound!) LEAVE IT!
Thank you, Karen, for the door advice. I got confused because of the half-wall behind the door. Kind of you to reply.
Thank you for these wonderful tips. Is there a Feng Shui cure for doors that cannot fully open because of architectural obstructions? I live in an apartment with a built-in room divider that will allow the front door to only open half-way. It can’t swing all the way back. The dining room is on the other side of the four-foot high divider. I can’t remove the divider, so what cures would work in this situation?
Hi Liz – It sounds as if your door opens 90 degrees rather than 180 degrees. That’s not a problem. Most of the doors in the world only open 90 degrees!
The problems start when there are obstructions behind a door that prevent it from opening the full 90 degrees.
I have a metal security door (opens outward) on the outside of my main door (which opens inward). Is this bad? If so, how do I go about curing/fixing this? I need my security door for security purposes but I can’t have it open inward – doesn’t work. Please help. Thanks.
If the front door to a home opens outwards, it can have the effect that it’s much more difficult to bring new opportunities into your life, and when they do appear, you are likely to have to take a step backward before you can move forward. An added security door that opens outwards does not have the same effect, providing it is see-through rather than made of solid metal.
I have very small door chimes hanging on the door handle on the inside of the toilet room. The sound of the gentle & harmonious mini-chimes enables me or others to hear when someone has entered the facilities. Still recommend i remove them from the door handle? Where would you suggest hanging them instead?
Speaking of the door to the loo– should this door be left wide open (with the toilet lid shut, of course), or tightly shut or something else?
Thank you for an interesting & informative article.
Hi Kaci
Your toilet door wind chimes are a very good example of the type of decorative item my article mentions, and which I do not recommend for all the reasons listed. In fact I don’t recommend the use of wind chimes anywhere in a home, inside or out. They are often touted as a feng shui cure but I have never seen any evidence that they have any effect at all except that people who have a lot of wind chimes tend to be unnecessarily busy.
If you are interested to know more, here’s a link to an article I wrote about outdoor wind chimes: Why wind chimes are the UK’s most hated garden accessory
I see that you snuck in a quick question about toilet doors too 🙂
That’s a completely different topic and would require a whole article to explain all the different aspects that need to be considered, especially if your toilet happens to be located in the Prosperity area of the bagua. I’ll put it on my list of possible future articles to write. In the meantime I can tell you that it always helps to keep the toilet seat down when not in use and the toilet door shut.
Thank you for this information; I find it fascinate to learn about how the different areas of one’s home correlate to one’s life. I am interested in learning more about these correlations, Karen. Can you direct me to a particular resource where these might be listed, please?
You can find more information about the feng shui bagua in Chapter 8 of my book, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, and if you want to go into more depth, get a copy of Feng Shui Made Easy by William Spear.