Healthy Home: Furniture Edition

As part of my “Healthy Home” series, I wanted to address the furniture that you put in your home. Whether you are looking to remodel, new build, down size, up size, or just re-vamp your existing home, furniture can play a large part in the design and health of your home.

Often times furniture can contain formaldehydes or brominated fire retardants. Which, while the intention of using these chemicals is designed to preserve the furniture, they can also produce a toxic off-gas which can be hazardous to your health. In addition to this, wood finishes are often covered in veneers or other finishes that have toxic off-gasing. While someone with good health might not see any affect, someone who is unhealthy or more prone to becoming sick (due to illness, allergies, or older age, etc.) might see some affects on their everyday lives. For example; a lower immune system, coughing, sneezing, allergies, etc. This issue is exhausted even more when we add double pane windows (designed to combat noise) to our homes, which essentially seals in these toxic chemicals into our rooms where we sleep at night.

There isn’t a solution to every problem, but one small step towards a solution is to select materials for your furniture that are natural, which are far less likely to cause any irritations.

What is feng shui

According to Google “Feng Shui is a system of laws considered to govern spatial arrangement and orientation in relation to the flow of energy (qi), and whose favorable or unfavorable effects are taken into account when siting and designing buildings.”

Feng shui is one of the basics of design which most designers learn about while in school, which studies the pshycology of human behavior within a room. This helps designers be able to identify the elements of feng shui that all create an atmosphere within a room. 

Feng shui can sometimes include crystals and other elements that may seem a little “out-there”, but the important part of feng shui is not the elements added to a space, but how you feel within the space. In my personal opinion, I think adding crystals to a room can be a little “out-there”, but it all comes down to pschycology. If you believe that adding a crystal to your room will make you feel less stressed/have more money/have better health, etc. then you are giving the crystals more “power”, and it may work for you.