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The House Whisperer- Angel De Para knows the Feng Shui Secrets of Home and Urban Design
Blueprint directory
March 12, 2007
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Just don’t ask him (or his client’s) to tell you what they are.
Two developers had already gone bankrupt trying to
build on the parcel of land in southern Miami-Dade,
and the latest owner was having problems with the
permitting and zoning process. So the company called in Angel
de Para for a consultation.
“I could tell just by looking at the site plan that the property
was going to have legal problems,” says de Para. “The entrance
was in the wrong place.” De Para told his clients to temporarily
seal off the main gate and replace it with an entrance in another
location. Soon afterward, the zoning and permits were
approved. The development is now in its final phase, with the
original entrance reopened.
There was nothing technically wrong with the
neighborhood’s entry, and de Para, a soft-spoken Cuban-
American, is not a land-use planner. He is a feng shui master, a
practitioner of the ancient Chinese art that analyzes the
location and orientation of buildings, landscapes, and interior
spaces to attune them to the flow of qi, the Chinese word for life force or spiritual energy. De Para used a
mathematical matrix to figure out the source of
the development's trouble, plugging in
variables like directional axes, the project’s
timing, and human protagonists. “The entrance
carries the most weight mathematically, and
the location indicated that it [would have]
permanent legal issues,” he says.
While de Para’s work may sound akin to
psychic readings or numerology, he maintains
that there is nothing supernatural or New Agey
about feng shui, except perhaps its reputation
among those who know little about it. “It’s pure
mathematics,” he says. “I have certainly seen
things that I cannot explain, but that has
nothing to do with what I do. I am sciencebased.
I don’t like things that are hokeypokey.”
Indeed, nothing in de Para’s pre-feng
shui background suggests the
“hokey-pokey.” A former aircraft
technician, his life up until
the early 1990s was a
story of conventional
second-generation
immigrant
success: He
rose through the ranks of the local
aviation industry to own an FAAapproved
repair station in southwest
Miami-Dade. But while his current
job may have nothing to do with the
unseen world, it was one of those
“unexplained” experiences that got him
started down the road to ancient Chinese
secrets.
“My wife went to see a psychic, who told
her that she would have a short life,” he says.
“She was very upset. So I went to the psychic
as a way of debunking him and making her feel
better. But as soon as I walked in the door, he
said, ‘Why do I see so many airplanes all
around you? Do you work at the airport?’”
This unnerving experience sparked de Para’s
curiosity about the non-reality-based
community. Over the next several years he
spent many hours browsing the metaphysics
sections of bookstores, until one day he
happened to pick up a volume on feng shui. “I
thought, that makes sense from a mathematical
perspective,” he says. “I was curious, and then I
started going to Asia.”
He ended up studying with Grand Master
Yap Cheng Hai in Malaysia, and what he
learned as Yap’s “closed-door student” was
vastly different from what passes for feng shui
in the U.S., which is usually based on the
simplified teachings of the “Black Hat” school,
a Western sect of recent vintage that de Para
dismisses as New Age claptrap.
“None of the techniques [Black Hat practitioners] use exist in Asia,” he says. “There is no such thing.
[Black Hat] was very simple, everyone could practice it, so it
became really big at one time. But you can’t apply one mold to
every house. Otherwise everyone living on the same side of a
street would have the same fate.”
He sketches a matrix on a piece of notepaper to illustrate what
he does. “It’s based on the calculus, on all the cells in the grid,”
he says. “How the numbers in the cell repeat will predict events—
past, present, and future.” Variables like time and directional
orientation are given
numerical values and plugged
into the grid; the human
element is represented by
birth dates. “It’s no different
from how an actuary
computes your odds of having
a heart attack,” he says. “I use
your surroundings. That floor
is built on a grid;
mathematically you can
predict a real estate trend.”
In Asia, feng shui is an
entrenched part of
mainstream business culture:
No skyscraper can be built in
Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur
without being “feng shuied.”
But here in Miami, de Para
does not explicitly advertise
himself as a feng shui master,
largely because of what he
calls the “stigma” associated
with New Ageism. His card is
plain, adorned only with his
name, phone number, and a
golden dragon. And while his
clients (some of whom keep
him on retainer to the tune of
$20,000 a month) include
movie stars, financiers, and
local politicians, he won’t
reveal any names. “I have clients who have sat with the president
four times,” he says. “If you had a trick that was your success, you
wouldn’t disclose it.”
De Para has a few trade secrets of his own. He says he’s come
up with a formula for shopping-mall success, which he would not
disclose to this reporter. “I spent nine months sitting in Bal
Harbour [Shops] for hours each day, doing an audit, thinking
about it,” he says. “Why is it a success, when some other high-end
malls are not?” At the end of the nine months, he had his “Aha!”
moment, he says, discovering two key feng shui characteristics
that Bal Harbour shared with other successful malls, such as
Dadeland, and without which no high-end shopping center can
expect to succeed.
Feng shui principles can also be applied on a much larger
scale, at the level of entire cities and regions. Last year, the
government of Surinam asked for de Para’s input on a new
master plan for its capitol, a project he says could have a
profound effect on that city’s economic and political life. Looking
at his own hometown’s exploding growth and rapidly changing
built environment, de Para believes that things are generally
going in the right direction
in Miami, but sees some
trouble spots. “For complete
feng shui, you need water
and mountains,” he says. In
an urban environment, the
buildings are the
“mountains”—skyscrapers
create good energy. But a
city’s streets are its “rivers,”
and clogged ones obstruct
the flow of qi. De Para says
that from a feng shui
perspective, the skyscraper
explosion is a good thing,
but that Miami would do
well to attend to its rivers
before it gets thrown
completely out of balance
(an assessment with which
most conventional urban
planners would
emphatically agree).
Regarding the local real
estate market, de Para’s
matrices indicate more
storm clouds on the horizon.
“I had to write a report for
one of my developers three
years ago,” he says. “I told
him that the real estate
market was showing a
repetitive pattern between 1926 and 1980, and that, if I was right,
we would start to see a decline after the mid-part [of 2006], and
that we would be starting a full decline this year. And it has
pretty much continued that way.”
He says the market will probably stay sluggish for another
year and a half. But then he offers another, somewhat more
bullish prediction: The casinos are coming. “Casinos couldn’t
enter Florida before, in the last 20 years,” he says. “But in the
next 20 years, they can.” Whether this will be a good thing for
the state, the feng shui matrix cannot say. “That’s relative to
whoever benefits, right?.”
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