What the bayou behind your house actually means

Clients often mention the water behind their lot the way you'd mention a granite countertop — as an obvious plus. It isn't obvious, and it isn't always a plus.

Houston is threaded with water. Bayous, drainage ditches, retention ponds, the engineered lakes that anchor every master-planned community. A great many homes here back onto something wet, and people usually assume that's good feng shui, because water is associated with wealth.

The association is real. The assumption is too simple.

Direction comes first

Water is powerful precisely because it's not neutral, and its effect depends heavily on where it sits relative to the house. The same pond is a different feature depending on whether it's north, south, or west of your front door, and on where it falls relative to your home's facing.

This is why I can't answer the question over the phone. "There's a lake behind us" tells me almost nothing until I know which direction "behind" is, and what the house faces.

Then movement

Still water and moving water behave differently. A retention pond that sits placid most of the year is a gathering feature. A bayou with real current is a moving one, and the direction of flow matters — water moving toward and past a home reads differently from water moving away from it.

Water that gathers and water that carries away are not the same feature, even when they look alike from the patio.

Drainage ditches are the ones people forget to mention, because they're ugly and nobody thinks of them as water features. They are. A concrete channel running along your back fence is doing something whether or not you find it attractive.

The Houston-specific complication

Everything above is classical. Here's the local layer: in this city, water near a home is also a flooding question, and I'd be doing you a disservice to talk about prosperity without mentioning it.

A home that takes water in a hard rain is not a home that holds anything, in the plainest possible sense. Before I get anywhere near placement and cures, I want to know whether the lot drains, whether the slab has moved, and whether the house has flooded before. Check the flood maps and the disclosure history. That's not feng shui advice — it's the precondition for feng shui advice being worth anything.

What to do with all this

• Note which direction the water sits from your front door — the actual compass direction, not "out back."
• Notice whether it moves, and if so, which way.
• Don't add water features casually. A fountain in the wrong sector is more consequential than a fountain in the right one is helpful. This is one of the few things I'd ask you not to improvise.
• Handle drainage as a building problem first. Grade, gutters, foundation. Then we talk placement.