Homeowners across the country are turning to gurus, shamans and other energy practitioners to cleanse bad vibes and elevate their spaces
7 min
Brook Harvey-Taylor felt creatively stuck.
The CEO and founder of Pacifica skin care and cosmetics company had moved into a Santa Barbara, Calif.-area estate in December 2022, and something was blocking her from decorating the five-bedroom, five-bathroom space. A year ago, the only furniture in the living room was two sofas. A year later, the living room still only has two sofas.
Then there was the matter of honouring the property, a 1980s vestige originally designed for a television producer by interior designer Michael Taylor, the godfather of the California look. Harvey-Taylor, 54, and her husband have a great reverence for the house—which has Ibiza finca-style overtones and a Mediterranean feel—and how it sits in nature. “We wanted to show the property and the original owner gratitude,” says Harvey-Taylor, who declined to disclose the purchase price.
So Harvey-Taylor enlisted Colleen McCann, 44, a Los Angeles-based shamanic energy practitioner, to harmonise the property’s energy. Home harmonising is one of the services McCann offers through her consulting firm, Style Rituals, which she founded in 2015 after a 15-year career as a fashion designer and stylist.
In November, McCann spent four days at Harvey-Taylor’s estate. They performed a Celtic space clearing blessing, paid ceremonial homage to the original owner and upgraded a spiral staircase’s feng shui energy flow, among other activities. But the pair says the biggest aha moment came when crystals, tarot cards and a dowsing pendulum helped reveal that locating Harvey-Taylor’s office within the house was creating a family-wide creativity block. This revelation, Harvey-Taylor says, and the subsequent scheme to move her office into the garage, feels like the beginning of unblocking her creative stuckness.
Across the U.S., homeowners are hiring house-energy specialists to reset and elevate their home’s energy, often through modern-day twists on ancient spiritual practices and healing arts. Real-estate professionals are tapping into their mystical sides, too, embracing these same ritualistic endeavours.
Ele Keats, 52, is an actress—she starred in Disney’s 1992 movie “Newsies”—who has been designing crystal and gemstone jewellery for 20 years. Through her Santa Monica, Calif.-based shop, Ele Keats Jewelry, she offers house crystal consultations.
Crystal healing, to wildly oversimplify it, is a practice rooted in the belief that crystals have healing powers: citrine amplifies creativity and wealth; rose quartz enhances love; selenite clears and purifies; and so on. Practitioners believe placing crystals on or around the body, or in a physical space, can balance energy. Crystals can be priced as little as about $3 for a small, hand-held piece, whereas world-class, museum-quality specimens can cost roughly $100,000 to $1 million and higher.
Keats works with homeowners such as a client who wanted to revamp the sad, empty energy she felt permeated her Los Angeles dwelling. “There was no life force,” Keats says. To usher in vibrancy and aliveness, Keats helped the client with the personal process of positioning a half-dozen or so crystal types, varying in sizes and forms, inside and outside the client’s residence.
Keats was recently hired to select crystals to inlay under a 50-foot indoor saltwater pool at The Huron, a 171-unit condo building slated to open in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, in January 2024. “It was top of mind to make sure the pool space is tranquil, rejuvenating and soul-cleansing,” says Jared White, senior vice president at Quadrum Global, the New York-based company developing the project, where offerings currently range from $750,000 studios to $3.16 million three-bedrooms. “That discussion went to crystals.”
In Boca Raton, Fla., Senada Adžem is Douglas Elliman’s executive director of luxury sales. She recently listed a $23.995 million Delray Beach, Fla., property at which the homeowners put their interest in crystal healing on display. They commissioned custom-designed chandeliers made from healing crystals. They use crystals as design pieces, including a nearly human-sized amethyst by the dining room’s doorway. Built in 2018, the house has six bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, and is 11,457 square feet of living space on 2.5 acres.
Additionally, after a house showing, the space is saged, says Adžem, referring to the ancient ritual of burning plants—in this case, sage—for purification.
Brook Harvey-Taylor’s energy stylist Colleen McCann says clients engage her in house energy work for many reasons. Some want their space’s energy refreshed annually. Others are experiencing a house-affecting life transition, such as moving, having a baby or divorcing. Others can’t put their finger on why they are feeling bad vibes. Then there are people who are freaked out. “They say, ‘There are doors slamming, the lights are flickering,’ ” says McCann, who works globally.
McCann says one of the many steps in her home-harmonising process is laying crystals and tarot cards on a house’s blueprint, and using a dowsing pendulum, tools she uses along with her intuition. Over the past 15 years, McCann has studied many different spiritual, mystical and metaphysical lineages. “My preference is to learn a lot of modalities and blend it together to make it my own,” McCann says. Consultations start at $1,000 and prices vary on the project’s scope.
New York-based Holly Star, 45, has 20 years of energetic work experience. She studied for five years with various gurus, healers and shamans. Her space-clearing process tends to involve custom bundles of herbal and botanical mixtures, sometimes up to three or four mixes of 10 or 15 types, such as frankincense, copal, pine, lavender and sandalwood. When working on a house, she does a lot of burning and bells. “I kind of go into a trance,” Star says. “It’s almost like I pan back from the space and I can feel the energetic templating shifting.” Afterward, clients often tell her their spaces feel light, says Star, who also owns Matter and Home, a spiritually inclined luxury homegoods boutique. Her space clearing fee starts at $2,000.
Sometimes houses need healing like people do, says London-based Emma Lucy Knowles, 39, who has been working in clairvoyance, crystals, energy, hands-on healing, light, meditation and spiritual coaching for 20 years. Knowles says she treats a house like a body: She reorients, manipulates and liberates a space’s energy to its true form. She uses energy healing, elemental sources (such as crystals and fire, the latter through burning palo santo, sage and incense) and sound (such as music, sound bowls, mantra or chanting). To close her sessions, she lights a violet flame for intention. She often decorates with crystals, which she says work like energy hubs around the house. Her space energy clearing work depends on square footage, but starts at $400.
Brooke Lichtenstein, 46, refers to herself as spiritual guide and family energy healer who, with her husband, is renting a five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 4,800-square-foot house in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where the median listing price is $4.3 million. In her house, she performs clearings, healing and blessings through rituals such as prayer, light visualisations, herb burning, rosewater spraying and sound healing using her voice in prayer and playing instruments such as crystal bowls, chimes and a harp. To her, this is home maintenance. “People do a lot of things to maintain their homes,” she says. “This is paramount for us.” Her 7- and 8-year-old sons sometimes join her practice. “To watch them owning their own space is a privilege to witness,” she says.
“People have a desire to have a spiritual component to their lives,” says Lytton John Musselman, Old Dominion University’s Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany, Emeritus, who is an expert in the intersection of plants and spirituality. The University of Texas at Austin’s curator of gems and minerals, Kenneth Befus, agrees. “Humans believe in religion and the spiritual realm,” says Befus, a crystal expert. “We want to. It brings us peace.”
The problem, both scholars say, is separating the religious and psychosomatic from medical efficacy. Musselman says, “If I plant lavender in my garden and feel better, is that because I want to feel better? Or because I enjoy planting it, or smelling it? Or does it really have an effect on my other senses?”
Befus says crystal healing has no empirical scientific evidence. “Crystal healing is in the realm of metaphysical,” he says. “We call it pseudoscience.” However, he acknowledges the potential of the placebo effect. “That’s a place where crystals could be healing,” he says. “It’s not in the word ‘energy’ or ‘chakra’ or ‘aura.’ ”
Musselman—whose latest book, “Solomon Described Plants,” is a guide to biblical botany—says as a scientist he seeks documentation from field studies and scientific literature. “I was at a large, wonderful bazaar in Iraq, and I saw a very poisonous rosary pea,” he says. “I asked the vendor what it was for, and he said, ‘For women to drive away evil spirits.’ I thought, ‘How are you going to test that?’”
Energetic healing practitioner and energy consultant Holly Star says, “People may not be able to scientifically prove how something came to be, but I believe how you feel and seeing change in your life or home is the proof.” She says sometimes the most powerful part of a clearing lies in homeowners learning about themselves. “Their lives start to open,” she says. “It’s kind of a backdoor.” Jewellery designer and crystal-store owner Ele Keats shares a similar sentiment: She says she’s heard countless stories of how crystals have enabled breakthroughs and life improvements.
Chelsea Leibow, 33, took the backdoor approach when she addressed a problem in her house using tarot, a tool for divination and tapping into one’s intuition.
In September 2022, Leibow and her husband, Mike Farrell, 34, purchased a five-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,200-square-foot house in West Orange, N.J., for $805,000. Early on, they splurged on hiring painters for their front foyer, stairway, second-floor landing and back hall. The painters did a great job. The issue was that Leibow deeply believed she chose the wrong color of white paint.
“I could not live with myself,” Leibow says. “I was like, ‘It’s wrong and I hate it and I want to fix it immediately.’ ” Her husband, on the other hand, thought they should embrace the paint. He thought it looked exactly like every other white paint.
To get a grip on the situation, Leibow sorted through her feelings using tarot, a modality she dabbled in during college but got more serious about in 2020, when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, she began attending a Sunday Zoom group led by a practicing witch who is an expert in tarot and astrology. “The cards were like, ‘You’ve got to chill out. Just give it a beat,’ ” says Leibow, who owns communications firm Chelsea Leibow Communications.
Leibow listened to her husband—and the cards. The couple agreed the paint would stay, but if Leibow still detested it a year later, they’d get it fixed.
A year later, their foyer, stairway, second-floor landing and back hall are now a new colour of white paint.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The sports-car maker delivered 279,449 cars last year, down from 310,718 in 2024.
A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
