The Best Place To Put Your Stove, According To Feng Shui
Deciding where to place certain elements within a room can be tough, whether you're simply rearranging furniture, remodeling, or designing a room from scratch. This is especially true in rooms with more permanent fixtures, like your kitchen. Luckily, there's a whole practice dedicated to just that — feng shui.
Many people's understanding of feng shui is that it's a guide for arranging furniture, but it has a lot more intention behind it than that. The core of feng shui is rooted in Taoism and the goal is to make sure the chi, or energy, in your home flows uninhibited and that all the elements are in balance. This is determined by the arrangement and placement not just of furniture, but other items as well — such as the stove in your kitchen. The stove is incredibly important in day-to-day life, but especially so in feng shui, and its placement is very important for the proper flow and balance of energies.
Avoid placements near water
In feng shui, the stove is one of the most important elements — not just in your kitchen, but your whole home. It's heavily connected with wealth and prosperity, as well as marriage, family, and health. As such, its placement is very important. One of the biggest things to keep in mind with stove placement is that it's represented by the fire element, and it shouldn't be put in contrast to water elements.
Victor Cheung, a feng shui consultant at Feng Shui Nexus, advises against placing your stove within the immediate proximity of your sink. If you have a galley-style kitchen or an island, do your best not to place your sink directly across from the stove. Similarly, the stove and sink being directly next to one another isn't recommended — a couple of feet should be adequate spacing. Don't just focus on the kitchen itself, but the surrounding rooms, too. Check if you have a bathroom directly above your kitchen, for example, and specifically avoid having your stove directly under a toilet.
The island
Another key element of your stove placement for feng shui is whether to have it against a wall or on a central island. The answer is still slightly contested among feng shui professionals. As Victor Cheung explains, it's a general rule of feng shui that the most important element of a room — bed, desk, couch, stove — should be placed against the wall.
However, it's also recommended that those important elements are placed in the command position, which means you can see the entirety of the room from the object's vantage point. A couch, desk, and bed can all be placed against a wall without compromising your view of the rest of the room. With a stove, though, your back will always be turned to the rest of the room. This is why some feng shui experts recommend placing it on the kitchen island. Also, feng shui consultant Kartar Diamond of Feng Shui Solutions explains that a common feng shui superstition advises against having your back turned away from the room when cooking for safety.