A bagua map for an apartment: what counts as your home
Published 2026-08-25
Every instruction for laying a bagua map assumes you know where your home stops. In a house you do: the outside walls. In an apartment the same sentence has at least two readings, and they put your rooms in different cells.
This is about the three-door bagua — the nine-square grid from Black Sect Tantric Buddhism (BTB), oriented by the front door. If you are working with the compass version instead, the outline question is different and smaller, and it is covered at the end.
The unit, or the building?
Take the unit. Draw the walls that enclose the space you have the keys to, and stop there.
The argument for the building is that the building is the structure and the unit is a room inside it. The argument for the unit — and the one most practitioners use — is that the grid is meant to map the space you occupy, and a nine-cell grid over a forty-unit tower tells you nothing about your own flat. Sources that use the building do it as a second, coarser reading laid on top, not instead.
So: your unit’s walls are the footprint. The tower’s shape does not enter into it.
Which door orients the grid?
The door you enter your unit by. Not the building’s street entrance, not the lobby, not the door from the parking garage.
The bottom row of the grid sits on the wall containing that door, and the whole grid turns with it. This is worth stating explicitly because the equivalent question in the compass system has a genuinely contested answer — practitioners disagree there about whether to use your own door or the building’s main entrance, and the two produce different charts. That argument is set out in which door counts in an apartment. In the three-door system it does not arise in the same form: the grid is anchored to the entrance of the space being mapped, and the space being mapped is your unit.
What is inside the outline and what is not
The edges are where apartments differ from houses, and where most of the real ambiguity lives.
- A balcony or terrace. Outside. No walls, no enclosure. If it has been glazed in and is now part of the room, it is inside.
- An enclosed sun room or a glazed-in loggia. Inside, for the same reason.
- The corridor outside your door. Outside. It is shared, and it is not yours.
- A private entrance hall inside your door. Inside — it is part of the enclosed space, and it is usually where the grid’s Career cell lands.
- A storage cage in the basement, or a numbered parking bay. Outside. Not contiguous with the space you live in.
- A shared wall with a neighbor. It is a wall. Draw it like any other. Nothing in the system asks what is on the far side.
The reason to be careful here is arithmetic rather than doctrine. The grid divides the outline into three equal parts across and three deep, so moving one edge moves every cell boundary. Including a three-meter balcony on a nine-meter-deep flat pushes the whole grid a third of a cell, which is enough to move a bedroom from one cell to the next.
Apartments are rarely rectangles
Most units have a notch: a service shaft, a recessed entrance, an L where the kitchen sticks out. When the outline is not a rectangle, part of a cell falls outside the walls, and the tradition calls that a missing corner.
How much of a cell has to be absent before it counts is disputed, and the answer changes the reading. That argument, with the four different thresholds sources use, is in missing corners in an L-shaped home.
One case specific to apartments: a recessed front entrance, where the door sits back in a notch. The notch is outside your walls, so the entrance wall of the grid is the plane of the outer wall, not the plane of the door. People commonly line the grid up with the door itself and end up with the grid shifted by the depth of the recess.
A studio is the same procedure with one room
A studio gets a grid like anything else — the outline is the walls, the entrance wall is the bottom row, and the nine cells fall where they fall. The difference is that one room now spans all nine, so every cell contains part of the same space and the reading is about zones rather than rooms.
That is genuinely less useful than it sounds. In a one-room flat the three-door grid will tell you that your bed is in, say, Family and Health at once, which is a description rather than a recommendation. What actually constrains a studio is that the bed, the sofa and the stove all want different parts of one room, and the compass system has more to say about that collision than the grid does — worked through in feng shui for a studio apartment.
If you are using the compass version instead
The outline question is smaller but does not vanish. There, the eight sectors radiate from the center of the plan, so the outline decides where the center is — and moving the center rotates which part of the flat falls in which sector. Same rules as above for what is inside: unit not building, glazed balcony in, open balcony out.
What the compass version does not need is the door. It is anchored to magnetic north, so it does not turn with your entrance. The difference between the two maps, and why they put the same room in different places, is in two things called a bagua map.
You can lay the three-door grid on your own outline with the bagua map tool, which draws the footprint, the entrance wall and the nine cells, and marks any part of a cell that falls outside the walls.