Standing outside a house for a few minutes before going in makes clients nervous. They hold the door open. Some assume I am calculating something.
I am not. I am looking at whether there are steps, which way the door swings, what my eye lands on when it opens, and which way my feet want to go.
By the time I walk in I have a fair idea of what is wrong with the rest of the house.
The mouth of qi
The term is grander than the thing it names. What it comes down to is traffic. You go through that one spot four or five times a day and a thousand-odd times a year, and so does everything else arriving or leaving: deliveries, visitors, whoever storms out after an argument.
Yangzhai Sanyao (阳宅三要), a Qing text, ranks door, master bedroom and stove, and puts the door first. I agree with the ranking, for a reason with nothing mystical in it. Nothing else in the house gets that traffic, so a fault there is charged to you daily rather than occasionally.
The first three steps
You need somewhere to stand.
Keys down, bag off, shoes off, umbrella dealt with, a word to whoever is home. About a square metre of floor, a light, and a surface.
Older Sydney houses generally have it. Porch out the front, hallway inside, bedroom doors either side. That hallway gets called dark and it is, but there is a buffer behind the door and the buffer is the point. What breaks it is the renovation. Front wall out, open plan, and the door now opens into the middle of the living room with whoever is on the couch looking up at you. Live in that a few years and you will find coming home slightly uncomfortable without ever working out why.
Apartments are worse. Plenty of two-bedroom plans put the door into the corner of the living area with nowhere to turn around.
It is also the cheapest item on my list: a shallow console or shoe cabinet set across the space, a rug to mark where you land, a warm light overhead.
Which way it swings
Facing inverts below the equator. North is the sun side here, so a north-facing front door means the porch gets winter sun and the concrete is warm to stand on. A west-facing door is hot to touch by three in the afternoon through summer, and a wall of heat comes in with you. Shade over a western entry does more good than most of what I could suggest inside.
Hinges almost nobody thinks about. Australian front doors swing inward, with a screen door outside swinging out. Whether they sit left or right decides which half of the entry is hidden behind the open leaf as you walk in: hidden hallway or hidden living room, quite a different arrival. Swapping sides is half a day for a carpenter, though check behind the door first: light switches, a cupboard, sometimes there was never a choice.
What the door opens onto
Front door in line with the back door. Inner-west terraces and semis are the classic case. One hallway running dead straight from the front door to the kitchen, back door beyond, the two lined up. The folk formula makes an unkind claim about your finances and I do not repeat that half.
What I will say is what it does. It makes a wind tunnel, pleasant on a north-easterly summer afternoon and not in a July southerly, and nothing on that line stays put. Paper migrates, doors slam themselves. The other half is that the hallway is pure circulation, taking the best long strip through the house and doing nothing with it.
The fix is not to block it, since blocking it makes the back of the house stuffy. Interrupt the straight line partway along: a narrow console, a waist-high plant, a half screen, anything leaving seven or eight hundred millimetres to walk through. A heavier curtain at the back door helps.
Door facing the stairs. Nearly every double-storey project home built here in the last twenty years uses one plan: small entry, staircase straight ahead or slightly to one side, the full flight in your face as the door opens.
The formulas split this by direction of travel. Stairs going up: qi comes in the door and gets carried straight to the first floor, so the ground floor holds nothing. Stairs going down, in a split level or a house on a slope: qi drains away, and some practitioners call that 卷帘水, juan lian shui, and get dramatic about it. That term comes out of landform practice, where it describes water running straight off a site. Using it for an indoor staircase is a later borrowing and not everyone in the trade accepts it.
I am not confident about this one. Which of the two is worse depends on who you ask, and my own cases have not shown me a difference I could rely on. What I can see is other things. Your eye gets pulled upstairs the second the door opens, so the ground floor feels smaller than the plan says. And the entry and the foot of the stairs are the same square metre, where a household collides with itself in the mornings; with small children that spot needs attention for ordinary reasons.
So my advice comes out of the visible half. Distance between the door and the first tread, a side table or a rug so the two actions separate, proper light at the foot of the stairs. On the up-versus-down reading I tell clients what the school holds and leave it to them.
The powder room. Newer two-storey plans park it under the stairs or beside the entry, door lined up with the front door. The folk line is 开门见厕，秽气冲人, open the door onto the toilet and foul qi comes at you. What that amounts to in a house is smell, damp, and the first thing a guest sees being a toilet. Keep the door shut, fix the exhaust fan, and a self-closing hinge costs about twenty dollars.
Doors nobody can find. The shrub out front has gone three years without pruning, the porch light globe has been dead for two, the street number is under a creeper. Some of this is the mouth of qi. The rest is that a house a courier has to hunt for has already lost its front door in practice.
The Australian complication
An enormous number of houses here are never entered through the front door.
The car comes up the driveway to a carport at the side or the back. People get out, through the side gate, in through the laundry. After a few years the front door is ceremonial, opening a handful of times a year, and the key may not be on the ring. The people who ring a front bell in this country are mostly couriers and missionaries.
The mouth of qi is the door people actually walk through.
I read the real entrance as the entrance, the front door separately as the formal one. So the side entry has to be run like an entry. A light. Somewhere to drop keys and shoes. No garden tools or flattened boxes on the floor. In a lot of houses that patch is the messiest square metre on the property, because nobody thinks of it as the front of anything.
The front door still gets maintained. It is where the street number lives, the address made physical. Bell that rings, light that comes on, lock that turns. File that under Feng Shui or under basic upkeep, whichever you prefer.
What can and cannot be moved
The good thing about the entry is that almost none of this requires touching structure.
Sometimes it does. If the door is in the wrong place to begin with, or there is nowhere to make a landing space, you are into real work: a DA or CDC plus an engineer’s sign-off for load-bearing work in a freestanding house, and strata approval for anything touching common property or structure in an apartment. I quote that honestly and most people take the cheaper path, which handles most of it. Check with a registered structural engineer and your council or strata manager before you plan around any of this.
Nobody needs to buy an ornament. The most expensive thing I have recommended for an entry is a shoe cabinet.