Where to put a desk in a feng shui bedroom
Published 2026-08-20
In a bedroom narrower than 3.45 m, the bed and the desk cannot both sit where their own rules want them. What stops it is arithmetic, not doctrine, and the number comes straight out of the code behind our two tools.
The two rules aim at opposite walls, which is the good news
A bed is judged by the direction the sleeper’s head points toward. A desk is judged by the direction the person sitting at it looks. Both come from Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) once a Kua number is involved, and both are about direction rather than about which corner of the floor the furniture stands on.
Aim both at the same direction and they land on opposite walls. To sleep with your head toward the west you put the headboard against the west wall. To look west with a wall behind your chair, you sit against the east wall. So the two pieces of furniture never compete for the same wall. They compete for the floor between them.
Where 3.45 m comes from
Three defaults in src/lib: a bed is 2.0 m long, a desk is 0.7 m deep, and the code allows 0.75 m
for the seat. Put the bed against one wall and the desk against the wall opposite and the room has to
be at least 2.0 + 0.7 + 0.75 = 3.45 m across that axis. Below that, deskFits in
src/lib/office.ts refuses the position outright — there is no low score, the wall simply drops off
the list.
A room that misses by five centimeters
Room 3.4 m wide by 3.0 m deep, top wall facing north, a 0.9 m door in the south wall, a 1.4 m window in the north wall. The occupant is Kua 8, whose Yan Nian direction is west.
- The bedroom layout generator puts the bed on the west wall, head toward the west, at 96 points. No other wall comes close: the next one down scores 48.
- The desk tool, given the same room, puts the desk against the east wall with the wall behind the chair, looking west, at 100 points — a Strong position, and the best score the model can produce.
Both answers are the best their tool can give, and they cannot both happen. The bed takes 2.0 m of the room’s 3.4 m width. That leaves a strip 1.4 m wide, and the desk needs 1.45 m. Five centimeters.
This is not a quirk of one Kua number. Run the same room for Kua 1 and the bed goes to the east wall, head toward the east, at 92, while the desk goes against the west wall with the wall behind the chair, looking east, at 98. The collision is identical, mirrored.
Four ways out
| Option | What it costs |
|---|---|
| A shallower desk | A 0.6 m deep desk needs 1.35 m, and in that 1.4 m strip all four walls pass the fit test again |
| Move the bed’s head off its best direction | In that room the second-best wall drops the bed from 96 to 48 |
| Give the desk a side wall instead | The two remaining walls leave the Kua 8 occupant looking north (16 points) or south (10), both Compromised, and neither is one of their four directions |
| Put the desk in another room | Nothing, if you have another room |
The first line is the one most people can act on, and it is also the least discussed. Desk depth is the variable in this problem, not the bed and not the compass. No arithmetic in either school decides which of the four to take.
What neither tool knows
The desk tool scores an empty rectangle. There is no bed in it. The bedroom generator has no desk in it. Neither one will warn you that its top answer is unreachable once the other piece of furniture is in the room — you have to draw both on the same plan and check the leftover strip yourself. Both tools also assume a plain rectangle with the furniture parallel to the walls. See method and assumptions.
The sector question is a separate question
“Which corner of the bedroom should the desk go in” and “which way should I look” are two different questions with two different inputs. The direction you look comes from your birth year. Which sector a corner of the room falls in comes from the building’s sitting direction, which has nothing to do with you. The compass bagua map is the page for the second question.
Keep that page and our three-door bagua map apart. The three-door method (BTB, also called Black Sect) ignores the compass and pins its nine squares to the front door, so it returns a different sector for the same corner. Combining the two produces contradictions rather than a second opinion.
The objection to the room itself
A good number of practitioners would rather there were no desk in a bedroom at all, on the grounds that you should not work in the room you sleep in. That is a position about how the room is used, not a compass rule, and Eight Mansions has nothing to say about it either way. If the desk has to be there, the arithmetic above is what you are working with.