The corridor outside your apartment door has no windows. Carpet, a fire door at each end, lighting that runs at three in the afternoon as much as at three in the morning. That one fact rearranges most of what the classics have to say about a front door.
Nobody writing in the Ming dynasty had this problem.
What the old texts assumed
Yang zhai, the branch dealing with houses for the living, was written for a walled compound: a gate, a courtyard, a stove, a well, something solid behind the building and something open in front. All of it rests on an assumption nobody bothered to write down, which is that the building is yours on all four sides, top and bottom included.
An apartment breaks that in every direction. Your front door is common property and so is the wall it sits in, there is a household above you and one below, your ground is a slab forty metres up, and you don’t get to choose the colour of your own balcony railing.
So the work is sorting out which of the old rules still have a physical basis and which don’t.
Which facing I use
I take the facing from the unit’s own main light source, usually the wall with the balcony and the living room glass. Not the building’s lobby entrance.
The reason is where the air comes from.
Your entry door opens onto an internal corridor with no weather in it. What comes through it is conditioned air out of a fire-rated passage, not outside qi. The Eight Mansions line puts the facing on the door, which works when the door opens onto a garden and a street. Xuan Kong reads the side the building takes its air from, so the two schools already disagree about houses, and an apartment door gives neither of them much to work with. Outside arrives through the balcony wall, so that is where I put the facing.
The other reason is less theoretical. Most people in a Sydney building never use the lobby. They park on B1 or B2, tap a fob and go straight up; parcels land in the lockers by the letterboxes. A single building-wide facing hangs off a door most residents open a few times a year.
I still record the building’s orientation and use it for terrain: which street it fronts, how the ground falls, where water runs. What I don’t do is run one chart across every apartment in the tower.
Strata sets the boundary of the advice
Worth getting to early, because it constrains everything after it. Your front door is common property: you can’t move it and you can’t replace it, subject to your own strata plan and by-laws. The rules also differ state to state, with an owners corporation in NSW and Victoria and a body corporate in Queensland, so take anything contentious to your strata manager or a solicitor. Nothing goes on the façade; ask the owners corporation about a mirror on the outside wall and you will almost certainly be knocked back. Most schemes won’t let you enclose the balcony either, so check your by-laws. A shoe cabinet can’t live in the corridor, which is a fire egress path.
Which removes the freestanding-house toolkit whole: door orientation, fence lines, screening plants, drainage.
What remains is inside your own door: circulation, furniture, which wall the bedhead is against, which way the desk points, which room is whose, where the light fittings are.
Apartment reports come out shorter than house reports, because there is less that can be changed. Which bedroom the parents get, which wall the bed goes against: in a four-bedroom house you can afford to be approximate. In seventy square metres you cannot.
Single aspect
In the double-loaded corridor buildings I’ve worked in around Sydney, most units are single aspect. Glass on one side, neighbours and corridor on the other three.
No cross ventilation. Opening the front door for air pulls in corridor smell, that permanent carpet-and-cleaning-product note anyone who has lived in one will recognise. Your real air changes come from the kitchen rangehood and the bathroom exhaust. Both extract; there is no designed inlet.
Orientation compounds it. Sydney sits at thirty-four degrees south, the sun is in the north, and a single-aspect apartment facing south takes no direct sun through the whole of winter, and only an early-morning and late-afternoon graze of it in midsummer. The NSW Apartment Design Guide asks that 70% of units get two hours of direct sun to living rooms and private open space between 9am and 3pm on 21 June, and caps the units with no winter sun at all at 15%. Developers build to that line rather than past it. East and west units count toward the 70% as well, so it isn’t only the north face that complies. Victoria works off a different standard again.
Push the places you actually sit toward the light: desk, sofa, wherever homework happens. Keep the darkest inner room off long-term sleeping duty, because a room with no direct sun all year is the one that goes damp and grows mould. And don’t hang heavy blockout over the only glass you have.
The balcony is your bright hall
Ming tang, the bright hall, is the open ground in front of a building: level, and holding rather than draining away. An apartment has no forecourt, so the balcony and the view off it is the bright hall, all of it.
So balcony aspect carries weight. North is the expensive one here, the reason every listing that can say north-facing does. West is unusable on a February afternoon. South sits in shade year round.
A unit with no balcony still has a bright hall, which is the view out of the main window, and the first metre of floor in front of that glass wants to stay clear. I have lost count of the apartments where the only good window has a row of boxes and a clothes airer in front of it, or a balcony holding the bike and the dead bar fridge, and the owner tells me the place feels stuffy. Clients understand “you have blocked your bright hall” faster than anything I might say about qi.
What your door opens onto
Facing the lift. Open your door and you stand in the building’s traffic: people waiting, talking, pressing the button, machinery running at two in the morning. Everything you can do is on your side of the door: a waist-height cabinet or a curtain so opening up doesn’t put the apartment on display.
Facing the bin room. Smell is one problem, sound the other, and somebody drops a bag at midnight and the corridor hears it go down. I never soften this one.
End of the corridor. The old formula warns about a long passage running straight at a door, which plenty of practitioners import as-is. In Sydney buildings the unit at the end is usually the corner one, dual aspect, the best light on the floor, and I’m not talking anyone out of it. What matters is the corridor: how long, whether it turns, whether there is a window at the end. Twenty metres of windowless straight run ending on your door is worth avoiding. A corridor with a window at the end, brighter as you walk it, I won’t argue with.
Floors, and the part I can’t defend
There is a school reading of floor numbers by the five phases, off the last digit: one and six water, two and seven fire, three and eight wood, four and nine metal, five and ten earth. Plenty of practitioners judge floors that way.
I can lay it out. I am not confident in it. I haven’t found a pattern I trust across my own cases, and I tell clients as much: this is what the school holds, weigh it how you like.
What I do weigh is duller. Western sun upstairs, which in a poorly insulated tower on a February afternoon is not a subtle effect. Wind, because tall buildings whistle at the window seals and move slightly in a strong southerly. Street and driveway noise low down, the roller door cycling dozens of times a day, and ground-floor courtyards sitting hard against the footpath.
The car space
The classics have nothing on car parking, so I settled it myself. I don’t treat the space as part of the dwelling for directional purposes. It is the start of the walk you do twice a day.
What I read is that walk: how far, past what, whether daylight reaches it, which side the lift lobby is on. Some buildings put your space under a different tower, or route you back past the bin room door. I also check how badly the basement ventilates, a personal habit more than a professional one, and people still cram everything they own into the storage cage down there.