Articles

Each of these explains one rule the tools here calculate — what it says, where it comes from, and where practitioners disagree. Nothing predicts anything.

The bedroom

• Bedroom door facing a bathroom door
  Two doors square on across a hallway, one of them a bathroom. What the tradition reads into it, why an en suite is different, and what to do.
• Can my bed face north, south, east or west?
  Three of the four cardinal directions belong to the same half of people. Which half you are in comes from your birth year, not from a general rule.
• Is a beam over the bed bad feng shui?
  What the tradition objects to is overhead mass, not carpentry. That distinction decides whether a boxed-in beam, a soffit or a sloped ceiling counts.
• Is a bed sharing a wall with the bathroom bad feng shui?
  The objection is narrower than the usual wording. It covers the wall behind your head, and one half of the reasoning is plumbing rather than tradition.
• Where to put a desk in a feng shui bedroom
  In a bedroom narrower than 3.45 m the bed and desk cannot both have their best wall. The arithmetic behind that number, and the choice it forces.
• A feng shui bedroom for couples with different directions
  If one of you is East group and the other West, no head direction suits you both. The overlap is exactly zero, and no arithmetic closes it.
• Feng shui bedroom mistakes that are not mistakes
  Four of the most repeated bedroom rules are stated backwards, and some trace to neither school this site runs. A few are exactly right.
• Which room should be the master bedroom?
  This is a location question, and Eight Mansions answers it from the building's sitting direction, not from anybody's birth year.
• Is a bed under a window bad feng shui?
  The rule is not really about windows. It is about something solid behind your head, which is why it also covers a doorway and a half wall.
• Is it bad feng shui for your bed to line up with the door?
  In line with the door means two things at once: the door is on the wall your headboard faces, and the two spans overlap. Neither alone counts.
• Feng shui bedroom rules, sorted by how much sources agree
  The usual checklist treats fifteen rules as equals. Seven appear in nearly every Eight Mansions source, four are repeated for shifting reasons.
• Where the feng shui command position actually is in a bedroom
  The command position is three conditions, not a feeling: see the door, stay out of its path, solid wall behind your head. In a small room they fight.
• Small bedroom feng shui: which rule do you give up?
  A 2.6 by 2.4 meter room cannot satisfy the standard bedroom rules at once, so the question is which to drop. What our generator returns at that size.
• Mirror facing the bed in feng shui: agreed rule, mixed reasons
  Almost every source says a mirror should not reflect the bed, and almost every source gives a different reason — some of them modern additions.
• Which direction should the head of your bed face?
  The direction depends on your birth year, not one rule for everyone — and in a square room half of all people reach only one of their four good directions.

Your own directions

• Born in January — which Chinese year counts?
  For your Kua number a January birthday always counts as the previous year. For the zodiac animal it depends where Chinese New Year fell.
• East group and West group, and why they never overlap
  Kua 1, 3, 4 and 9 form the East group and Kua 2, 6, 7 and 8 the West group. The two sets of four directions have no direction in common at all.
• How to take a compass bearing indoors
  Find the direction your house faces without letting steel and wiring ruin the reading, and check whether the bearing is stable enough to use.
• Kua number 5, and the number you use instead
  The Eight Mansions arithmetic can land on 5, which has no trigram and no directions. Practice substitutes 2 for men and 8 for women.
• What Sheng Chi, Tian Yi, Yan Nian and Fu Wei mean
  The four favorable Eight Mansions directions have names, themes and a derivation — from which lines of your trigram change, not a memorized chart.
• What is a Kua number, and how is it worked out?
  A Kua number is one of eight taken from your birth year and sex, and it sorts the eight compass directions into four that suit you and four that do not.

The whole house

• Front door in line with a window or back door
  If you can see clean through the house from the doorway, that is the fault called piercing heart. How to tell whether you have it, and how to break it.
• Front door facing a bedroom door: the mild one
  The least severe of the door clashes, and the most over-treated. When it actually matters, and the fix that takes five minutes.
• Front door facing a bathroom: what to actually do
  One of the most cited faults in feng shui, and one of the cheapest to answer. What the tradition asks, what it does not, and three fixes.
• Front door facing the kitchen: it is the stove that counts
  The classical objection is to seeing the stove, not the kitchen. That distinction decides whether you have this at all, and open plan complicates it.
• Front door facing stairs: which direction matters
  Stairs running down at the door and stairs running up are read differently, and only one is treated as a fault. How to tell which you have.
• A bagua map for an apartment: what counts as your home
  The grid goes over an outline, and in an apartment it is not obvious which outline. The unit or the building, and what to do with a balcony.
• A bagua map with directions: the compass version, step by step
  The other bagua map is fixed to north and never moves with your front door. How the bearing is taken, and why this one needs your birth date.
• The numbers on a bagua map, and which map they belong to
  One bagua map carries one to nine in a magic square, the other trigram numbers for eight sectors. Not the same numbers, not read the same way.
• How to read a bagua map, one step at a time
  The whole procedure for the three-door bagua: which outline counts as your home, which wall becomes the bottom row, and what the nine cells are.
• Apartment feng shui — which door counts?
  In an apartment your own front door and the building's main entrance give different Eight Mansions charts. Practitioners disagree on which to use.
• Feng shui front door direction: what it actually sets
  Eight Mansions uses the direction your front door faces, but reads the house name off the opposite one. What that decides, and what it does not.
• Which corner is the feng shui wealth corner?
  Two schools answer differently: one gives a corner set by your front door, the other a sector set by a compass bearing. Both, and why they differ.
• Missing corners in an L-shaped home
  In the three-door bagua an L-shaped plan pushes one or two of the nine areas outside the footprint. Which ones depends on the front door.
• What is a house gua, and how do you find yours?
  A house gua is the Eight Mansions name for a building, taken from the direction it sits rather than the one it faces. All eight, and the bearings.
• Two things are called a bagua map
  One bagua map is set by a compass bearing, the other by your front door, and they put the same areas in different corners. How to tell which.
• When you and your house disagree
  If you are East group and your house is West group, all eight sectors read the opposite way. Nothing inside Eight Mansions settles it.
• Where should the bathroom go in a feng shui layout?
  Eight Mansions wants the bathroom in one of the four weak sectors, not a good one. Here is the reasoning, and the four weak sectors for all eight house types.

The year

• 2027 flying star chart: the 5 Yellow moves north
  In 2027 the 5 Yellow sits in the north, so that is the ninth of the home to leave undug. The 8 White moves to the southeast. The chart turns over 4 February.
• 2026 flying star chart: the one rule worth following
  The nine annual stars for 2026 as a chart to hold against your floor plan, plus the one instruction that has teeth — and what it does not cover.
• The feng shui color of the year 2027 is not Pantone's
  Pantone picks one and announces it. The feng shui answer follows from the year's stem — 2027 is yin Fire, so red — and starts on 4 February, not 1 January.
• Which signs stand in a named relation to the 2027 Goat year?
  Four signs — Goat, Ox, Rat and Dog — stand in a named relation to 2027, each a fixed step around the wheel of twelve. The rule behind each.
• Feng shui 2027: what actually changes, and what does not
  Five positions move when 2027 starts — Tai Sui, Sui Po and the three Sha, all off the branch 未. Your Kua number, house chart and room sectors do not.
• Feng shui lucky colors for 2027, and where the list comes from
  Feng shui lists put the 2027 lucky color at red. Two steps get there: 丁 in the year name carries Fire, and Fire reads as red. Only the first is arithmetic.
• Tai Sui 2027: where not to break ground this year
  In 2027 Tai Sui sits at 202.5°–217.5° and the three Sha fall between 232.5° and 307.5°. The rule covers digging and demolition, nothing else.
• When does the Chinese year actually start? Two answers
  The zodiac animal turns at Chinese New Year and the Kua year turns at the start of spring, and in 2026 those two dates are thirteen days apart.
• Year of the Goat 2027: what the Fire in Fire Goat means
  2027 is the Fire Goat year, 6 February 2027 to 25 January 2028 — and Fire meets the Goat once every sixty years, not every twelve.

Other rooms

• Which way should your desk face in feng shui?
  Your desk direction is where you look while sitting, not where the furniture points. The wall-by-wall answer, plus four checks for the error.
• What a desk facing a wall actually costs you
  Facing a wall is a compromise, not a prohibition. What our desk model charges for it, what it charges more for, and the one thing it does not score at all.
• Studio apartment feng shui, where the rules genuinely collide
  In a studio the bed, sofa and stove want different sectors of one room, and Eight Mansions has no rule for that. What gives, and what still works.
• Feng shui desk placement: best direction, worse desk
  Where a desk goes and which way it faces are two questions, and across 14,400 room and Kua combinations our tools disagree about them in 27 percent of cases.
• Feng shui for a children's bedroom, computed not asserted
  A child's room follows the same Eight Mansions rules, with one difference: the direction half runs off the child's birth year, not a parent's.
• Feng shui kitchen and stove direction: practice is split
  Two lines of Eight Mansions practice put the stove in opposite sectors, and neither is a minority view. What they agree on is the stove mouth.
• Feng shui living room layout, and how little the compass says
  Eight Mansions gives the living room one weak preference and nothing at all about where the sofa goes. Here is the division of labor, honestly.
• Office feng shui when you cannot move the desk
  In a shared or rented office most feng shui advice is simply unavailable. What a fixed desk still determines, and what it rules out.
• Feng shui office layout, and the two questions people merge
  An office layout answers two questions with two inputs: which sector the room sits in, and which way you face. Most advice runs them together.
• Home office feng shui, where both charts apply at once
  A home office sits inside the building's chart and yours at once, and the two can disagree. In a converted bedroom the constraint is floor depth.

How the calculations work

• Layout, year, person: three layers of a feng shui answer
  Most contradictory feng shui advice is two people answering different questions. Three layers, what each settles, and which one your question is in.
• Is feng shui real? Separating three different questions
  Whether the calculation is checkable, whether the effect is measured, and whether it is a religion are three separate questions with three different answers.
• The start of spring is not always 4 February
  The Kua year boundary falls on 3 February in 39 years of 1900-2100, 4 February in 128 and 5 February in 34. Near the edge that changes your Kua number.
• Where feng shui schools disagree
  Contradictory advice about one room usually means two schools, not one wrong source. Where they split, and where practitioners split inside a school.
• Why two degrees changes your whole chart
  Eight Mansions palaces are 45 degrees wide, so edges fall at 22.5 and 67.5. At 22 the house reads Li, at 24 it reads Kun, and all eight sectors invert.