I’ve moved into a new house and am quickly realizing how little I know about interior design. I’m going to be using Josef Albers’ excellent book Interactions of Color to better understand how color should work in each room, but that still leaves me the challenge of what style of furniture to buy, how much, and where to place it.

Hat tip to Colin for recommending the Dear Modern YouTube channel, in which a lovable host walks you through the principles of feng shui in practical applications in modern design. There are quite a few needless videos, but I find them accurately labeled enough to immediately separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some quick takeaways from my early explorations:

Basics:

1. One of the best tests of feng shui fit is simply walking around your house from room to room. If you feel yourself deviating your path to avoid furniture, squeeze around corners, etc. the flow is significantly disrupted. This seems obvious, but reflecting on places I’ve lived, this happened more often than I’d care to admit.
2. Feng shui is not always about maximizing this flow but rather making sure that the disruptions are intentional and useful. Blocking the flow can help create separate, more intimate areas, as is often needed if the living and dining rooms have no dividing walls.

Specifics:

1. The coffee table should often be the focal point of living room (not the TV!) For my new space, this means the triangle coffee table I had and loved in my old place probably doesn’t belong in my new living room, which is narrow and long, as the shapes clash, tending to favor certain seating positions while being inconvenient/unwelcoming to others.
2. In a busy dining room (especially in an open concept, shared space like with the living room and/or kitchen), placing a centerpiece in the middle of the table can help focus the energy around the table. An empty table is surprisingly austere, something I didn’t notice until I played around with it in real life and felt the difference. A table runner would help with this as well.
3. Most dining room tables are too small. You’d be better off having a more generous, welcoming table and moving/eliminating other furniture to suit.
4. Even the shapes/vibes of objects visible through windows and doors need to be accounted for in your design. A harsher visible exterior will require more softness than average on the inside. 

Maybe all of this is visually obvious to everyone else. I’m enjoying exploring and learning.

For those interested in doing the same, I recommend approaching the Dear Modern channel by sorting the videos from oldest to newest. The first 4-5 are good intros, and you can select based on titles of interest from there.