Model of prosperity
FORTUNE didn’t just find Lizanne Falsetto’s front door. It was invited. Lured in from the ocean and guided through a channel of steps, its force sweeps up from the street, gathers momentum from a splashing water fountain at the entry, then disperses throughout her hilltop home.
Or so believes Falsetto, a nutrition bar entrepreneur and feng shui enthusiast. She has become rich, she says, after a remodel freed her dreary Ventura two-story house of its negative energy and she filled it with talismans collected from healers around the world.
If a home is about showing off wealth, Falsetto’s is about a quest for it, manifested in an aesthetic sensibility shaped by a $1,000-a-visit feng shui advisor who is sometimes at odds with her interior designer. The homeowner mixes the ancient Chinese theory of balancing energy through proper placement of walls, windows and wind chimes with folklore, religious symbolism and whatever appeals to her during shopping sprees.
Out on her living room terrace with a view of the Pacific, the former model rubs the wooden belly of a money god statue that she found at Goodwill, one of her first purchases in auspicious consumption. Although the statue wasn’t worth much to the person who donated it, it’s priceless to her.
“They wanted $25 for it, but I bargained them down to $10. Every day I rub it for more money and it’s working,” says Falsetto, whose thinkproducts company sold more than $13 million worth of nutrition bars last year at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and health food stores.
“The biggest stumbling block for most people is money,” she says. “But I’ve always believed it’s OK to want it, to ask for it and accept it. In fact, bring it on.”
The 44-year-old, Teri Hatcher look-alike practices a sort of superstitious capitalism. This year, she wants to almost double sales. To help achieve this, she recently invited a dozen employees to her re-energized house to have their feet detoxed, eat a healthful dinner prepared in her new high-tech kitchen and watch the DVD version of “The Secret,” the bestselling book about setting a stage for wealth.
“My home reinforces the way I live my life,” she says. “The mind works this way: the more you create positive, the more you can conquer.”
A few years ago, nothing was in place for Falsetto to bring in the good. She’d stopped modeling. Her company was small. Her marriage was ending.
When she and her husband split, she stayed with her two children in the house that they had lived in for an unlucky 13 years. Before they bought it, the cottage had been added on to, slap-dash style. In the 1980s, a previous owner splashed on “Miami Vice”-inspired colors, but the flamingo-pink walls and green-and-black checkered floors did nothing to brighten the cave-like rooms. The house was dark, depressing, she says.
On the advice of friends, she hired Udd’hava Om, an energetic-medicine and feng shui practitioner in Malibu, to look the place over and suggest changes. There wasn’t much Om liked. Steep steps vaulted from the street straight to the front door.
“It was hard labor just to get inside the house,” he recalls.
There was bad energy too, especially in the tunnel-ish master bedroom. The house was also falling apart; its wood frame and wallboard decayed.
No healthy person with children should have been living there, says Om, who changed his name from Johannes Steenkamp in 1994 to that of one of Krishna’s disciples.
For true feng shui harmony, he advised Falsetto to move or tear down the house and start over with a neat rectangle, where energy could circulate and not get trapped. But the divorced mom liked the elevated lot and needed to be practical.
The solution? They would move the outside steps 15 feet from their original place so that the stairs could ascend in one direction, then switch course. At the halfway point there would be a landing to cradle good energy. This configuration would be repeated with the indoor stairs.
They would also change the floor plan to eliminate the dead ends, add on a wing for a children’s playroom and guest bedroom, and open up the house to natural light with skylights, windows and sliding glass doors.
For the right colors, materials and even plants, they would take their cues from the rabbit -- Falsetto’s Chinese astrological sign. “A rabbit needs harmony, artistic expression and sensuality,” says Om, 66, a self-described Taoist. He was born in South Africa and has studied Eastern philosophy for almost half a century, including a stint at a Hindu monastery in India when he was a teenager.
BUT before architectural plans could be drawn or the construction crew called in, Falsetto would have to decide about the rocks. An odd-number of rocks piled outside on the left side of the front door meant she desired opportunity; on the right meant money. Of course, she thought, why not rocks on both sides, but Om stopped her. That would negate the power of the rocks, he says.
“What you’re really doing is being conscious of what is it that you really want,” says Om. “It’s easy to see this as hooey, but if you see it as action, it leaves no doubt that it can work.”
She placed the rocks -- man-made, not real ones to Om’s dismay -- on opportunity’s side. From opportunity, she figured, fortune would spring.
“Lizanne was already hard-working and ambitious,” says Om, who returned to the house in March for its monthly checkup. “Ambition in itself is not a bad thing, but it never brings pleasure. You have to change your environment to make you more aware and to nurture yourself with color, comfort, plants, good food. You also need to have an intention, feel it and be a good person and you’ll be rewarded.”
Om is explaining this while shifting around in a hardwood chaise in Falsetto’s unfinished home office. He doesn’t like this chair. It’s uncomfortable.
He also wants other things changed because they aren’t attracting good energy: a circular brown rug in the entry; jade dragons in the powder room; two wooden planks with Chinese characters on a bedroom wall. He understands some of the words’ meaning, but asks interior designer Elayne Jordan to get a full translation to make sure it’s not a negative statement. (Later that day, Falsetto takes the wooden scrolls down.)
When Om points these problems out to Jordan, she looks crestfallen. This is the first time in her 25-year career that she has had to worry about feng shui rules. “There are a lot of dictates of what is allowed,” she says, following Om through the house during the checkup.
The master bedroom was to be pink, Om determined, but Jordan didn’t see their client as a “pink lady; she’s too vivacious.”
As Falsetto walks past her bedroom altar and into the hallway, leaving her consultants to work out the details, Jordan explains that she stretched the color pink to be peach, rust and dusty rose. “When Lizanne brought home a red bedspread from China, I thought, ‘Oh, boy, how am I going to make that work,’” recalls Jordan, her hair pinned into a silvery bun. “But it does.”
As much as she likes the way the house looks, she wishes she could have gone by her instincts more often instead of taking color and placement cues from Om and others. “As a designer you have a sensibility to place furniture for the client,” says Jordan, who was squeezed between her client’s taste for exotic imports, builder Dave Ramsey’s tight schedule and a pleasant but persistent guy laying down thousands-year-old laws.
She says she has learned a lot from Om, but even before she read a feng shui book for this job, she already knew this: “The right colors and good design can make a person feel better.”
Om flinches at Falsetto’s spontaneous choices too, but then shrugs them off by saying that she’s a sensual person who is attracted to sensual objects. “She has too many phallic pieces,” he says, eyeing giant horns and totems in the living room.
A massive Chinese front gate makes too big of a statement at the “mouth” of the house, he says. He would prefer to see something more humble. And a 4-foot-long wooden club that she carted home from Fiji -- “she didn’t know it was an implement of death,” he says -- was moved from the living room floor to the fireplace mantel because, in that position, it dampens its destructive power and signals to the universe that it would be OK if it burned.
As for the “money god” in the terrace? He smiles. “Who knows what that is? That’s Lizanne,” says Om, who also consults on the wrapper colors of Falsetto’s nutrition bars, the arrangement and colors in her company’s office and the size of her SUV.
OM says purple is another lucky color for a rabbit. So hallway walls are painted violet, special air circulators pump the scent of lavender throughout the 3,900-square-foot home and Falsetto wears an eggplant shade of nail polish on her toes.
Bamboo is good for a rabbit too, but not the aggressively growing type. “I can’t have bamboo in soil because when it spreads it means my life is running ahead of me instead of me guiding my life,” says Falsetto, draped in a purple cotton skirt and bright red tank top and stretched out on her linen sofa in the living room.
Sprawling bamboo would also strangle her energy, just as the climbing ivy and bougainvillea -- once smothering her yards and fences -- were doing before she had them replaced with tidy succulents and manicured grasses.
Instead, bamboo is represented by tall cut stems standing in green ceramic containers. Her kitchen cabinets are made of polished solid bamboo and, just for fun, the countertops are an emerald shade of what’s called “bamboo” stone. “Green attracts money, so I have a lot of that color around,” she adds, her voice carrying over the Corinne Bailey Rae song playing on the stereo:
“Girl, put your records on, tell me your favorite song. You go ahead, let your hair down. Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams. . . .”
Doors are auspicious because they open to opportunity and this too fascinates Falsetto. Each door in her house was chosen because it was hand-carved in a faraway place she visited. The front door in the two-story entry came from China and it has been positioned to face an indoor aquarium that holds a lucky number of specifically colored fish. Above this door is another door, one she found in Kenya. It doesn’t open, just hangs there like art, but it means something to Falsetto: Wealth can enter into the second floor too. “I’ve found that if you give and create good, more of it will come back to you,” says Falsetto, who dreamed up a thinkPink bar to raise money for breast cancer. She also has plans to make a protein bar to be given to people who are homeless and undernourished.
When she takes her children, Alexa, 7, and Aydan, 4, to church, she reminds them that they aren’t there to pray for riches, but “to welcome in the good.”
“The changes I put myself through in the last few years have made me more confident, spiritually in-tune and happier,” she says. “As a CEO, I’m always dancing on my toes, but the water, colors and surroundings here help me be calm and make wise decisions. This is a great place for a rabbit to huddle.”