Front door in line with a window or back door
Published 2026-08-30
Open the front door and look in. If you can see straight out the other side, through a window or a back door or onto a balcony, that is the fault. The severe version has a name in the classical material — piercing heart — and the reading is that whatever arrives leaves again without stopping.
One look settles it
There is nothing to measure. Stand where a visitor stands and see whether you can see all the way out. If you can, you have it. If you cannot, you do not, and it does not matter that a window sits roughly opposite the door, or that the plan on paper looks like a straight line, or that the house is bright and open.
A door and a window can share an axis and still not line up, because a wall or a stair or a step down sits in between. The eye is the instrument here.
Why this gets confused with a selling point
Open plan and cross ventilation are things people pay extra for, and a listing that boasts about light coming in both ends is describing something genuinely good. So the question comes up over and over: is my bright open home a fault?
No, and the two things are easy to keep apart. Cross ventilation is about air and light moving, which the tradition has no argument with. The straight-through fault is about the door and an opening on the far side falling on one line so that you look clean out.
You can have the first without the second, and that is the whole reason the fix is not painful. Break the sightline and the air still moves. You have changed what the eye does, not what the air does.
Breaking the line
Anything solid. Anything that makes the eye turn.
A screen or a room divider between the door and the far opening is the classical answer and the most direct. An entry cabinet, a console or a shoe cupboard does the same job and earns its floor space, which in a small home is usually the version that actually happens. A broad-leaved plant works if it is tall enough to interrupt at eye level rather than knee level.
If the home already has a step down, a half wall or a hanging panel in roughly the right place, you may find the line is broken already. And if what you are looking through is a balcony door, closing it is the whole fix and costs nothing.
You are not blocking the route. People still walk through. You are stopping the eye from traveling in one uninterrupted line from the doorway to the outside.
The apartment version
In a corridor building this fault has a partner: a long corridor running straight at your front door. Read the same way, fixed the same way — an entry screen or a tall cabinet inside the door so that entering takes a turn. A short corridor, or a door set into the side of one, does not count.
Which door counts at all, in a building with several, is a question of its own.
Two things people try that do not work
A mirror. Someone will tell you to hang one to bounce the energy back. A mirror facing the front door is its own fault in Eight Mansions and in the form school both — what arrives is read as being sent straight out again. If there is already one there, moving it to a side wall is a fix in itself.
Getting the door’s compass direction right. That is a real thing with its own answer, but it is a different layer. A door can face your best direction and still look clean through the house, and the second problem does not care about the first.
What the tradition claims here is narrow: an arrangement in which nothing gathers. What follows for the people living in it, it does not say.
The other things a front door can face — a bathroom, a staircase running down at it, the kitchen, a bedroom door, a mirror — each have a different reading and a different fix.
If you want the rest of the entrance in the same detail — every door clash, the bright hall, the nine-square grid over your own plan — that is what The Home Feng Shui Walk-Through is. 43 pages, a fix attached to every item, apartments and houses treated as the different problems they are.