A couple of years after I opened Use What You Have Interiors, I had the pleasure of working with an amazingly talented singer named Kacey Cisyk. Hers was the original voice behind the song, You Light Up My Life as well as the one heard on hundreds of commercials such as, Have You Driven A Ford Lately? Kacey was an old-fashioned girl, in many ways, yet she always seemed to have a pulse on the latest trends before most people knew about them.

As we worked together on her apartment over-looking Central Park, she said, “Lauri, have you studied Feng Shui?” I replied, “Fung What?” She laughed and said, “Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shu-way), the Chinese science of placement.  You seem to be using some of the principles. Didn’t they teach you about that in design school?” No, they had not.

Well, Kacey proceeded to send me a copy of a book she’d just read by Sarah Rossbach and Professor Lin Yun: Feng Shui, The Chinese Art of Placement, the first published in the U.S. about the 5,000-year-old practice; as I read it, I experienced déjà vu. Had I been a Chinese decorator thousands of years ago? Probably not, but I had been using some of its principles, innately, because they seemed right: Correcting poor furniture placement that was blocking traffic in a room and, therefore, the flow of energy made sense; bringing balance to a space by using pairs of things, in order to make the place feel more comfortable, felt good – the list went on.

Flash to the future: Now, more than a quarter century later, U.S. booksellers devote entire sections to the subject of Feng Shui (which translates, literally, to mean wind and water). No longer viewed as hocus-pocus by Westerners, it has been embraced by developers, builders and homeowners as its benefits are seen, felt and, yes, experienced in thousands of houses, offices and apartments every year.

Today, whenever I apply Feng Shui principles, I think of Kacey, who succumbed to breast cancer ten years ago at 42. I look up at the sky and envision her as a little angel, singing, and getting a kick out of knowing she was on the cutting edge, again.