Feng shui bedroom rules, sorted by how much sources agree
Published 2026-08-19
Most bedroom checklists hand you a dozen rules as if they all carried the same weight. They do not. About seven of them turn up in nearly every Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) source, four more are repeated everywhere but rest on different reasoning depending on who is repeating them, and at least one item sold as a rule — what to do when two rules collide — belongs to no tradition at all. It is somebody’s judgement, and on this site it is ours.
So this is the same checklist, sorted by how much agreement sits behind each line. Eight Mansions is the school this site runs for the bedroom: compass-based, and the direction half of it comes from your birth year. The three-door bagua (BTB) ignores the compass entirely and is not what any of the directions below are drawn from.
Tier 1: rules nearly every Eight Mansions source gives
These are not controversial. If two sources disagree it is usually about wording or which one matters most, not about whether the rule exists.
| Rule | What the sources say | Does the generator check it |
|---|---|---|
| Solid wall behind the headboard | The head of the bed wants a wall, not a window and not a doorway | Yes — it flags a window or a door falling inside the headboard’s span |
| Not in line with the door | A bed lying straight down the line of the doorway is the placement most sources object to | Yes, when the door is on the wall opposite the headboard |
| Door visible from the bed | You should see who comes in without lying in the door’s path | Partly — it credits a door that is opposite-but-offset, or off to one side in a deep enough room |
| No beam overhead | An exposed beam should not cross over the head of the bed | Yes, but only as “a beam runs along this wall” |
| No bathroom behind the headboard | The headboard should not share a wall with a bathroom | Yes, same coarse input — one wall at a time |
| Walking room on both sides | The bed should not be jammed into a corner with one side against a wall | Yes, with our own thresholds: 0.45 m each side counts as clear, under 0.15 m counts as jammed |
| Head toward one of your own four directions | Which four depends on your Kua number, so it is different for you and the person beside you — see which direction should the head of your bed face | Yes, and this is the only part of the tool that uses your birth year |
Two things to know about how much of that the bedroom layout generator can actually see. It models a rectangular room with one door and one optional window, plus a bathroom wall and a beam wall you nominate. It does not know about a second door, a second window, a wall jog, a closet that blocks the sightline, a radiator behind the headboard, or a beam that crosses the middle of the room instead of running along a wall. And every position it produces has the headboard flat against a wall — it never proposes a bed angled out into the room, which is what practitioners often do when a direction and a solid wall cannot both be had.
Those last two facts interact. A headboard flat against a wall can only point at four directions, so if your four favorable directions are mostly diagonal, some of them are unreachable in a square room no matter what the tool is told. The Kua number calculator gives you your four; the generator tells you which of them the room can and cannot reach.
Tier 2: widely repeated, but the reasoning and the reach vary
Every one of these appears in a lot of bedroom advice. What changes from source to source is why, and how far the rule extends — and none of them fall out of the Eight Mansions compass arithmetic. They come from form-based practice, from BTB, or in one case from nowhere older than the twentieth century.
| Rule | Reasoning given | Where sources differ | In the generator |
|---|---|---|---|
| A mirror should not reflect the bed | Variously: you should not be startled by your own reflection at night; a mirror bounces back what reaches it; in BTB versions, a reflected bed stands for a third person in a relationship | Whether it means any mirror in the room, only one that reflects you while you are lying down, or only one facing the foot of the bed. Covering it at night versus moving the bed is also a split | No. It does not model mirrors |
| No electronics in the bedroom | Two unrelated arguments: a dark screen behaves like a mirror, and screens interfere with sleep. The second is ordinary sleep advice wearing feng shui clothes | No classical source names a television, so the reach is whatever the individual practitioner decides — some ban everything with a plug, some only screens facing the bed | No |
| No plants in the bedroom | Plants belong to a growing, active kind of energy that some sources consider out of place in a room meant for rest | This one is a genuine disagreement, not a variation. Other practitioners see no problem with plants in a bedroom, or recommend them | No |
| Mirrored wardrobe doors | Same argument as the mirror rule | Sharper in practice, because a mirrored closet is often full-height, fixed, and the only mirror in the room. Advice runs from cover it, to swap the doors, to move the bed | No — it models wardrobes not at all |
We are not telling you to ignore these. We are telling you that “no plants in the bedroom” and “solid wall behind the headboard” are not the same kind of statement, and a flat checklist hides that.
Tier 3: the priority order, which is our judgement
Small rooms cannot satisfy all of Tier 1 at once. Something has to give, and the moment you ask which rule do I give up, you have left the tradition behind. Eight Mansions names a direction Sheng Chi (生氣) or Jue Ming (絕命). It does not attach numbers to those names, and it does not say how a headboard under a window compares with a head pointing the wrong way.
We needed an order to sort positions, so we made one. It lives in src/lib/bedroom.ts in this site’s
source code, and here it is in full. Every position starts at 50 points.
| Finding | Points |
|---|---|
| Bed lines up directly with the door | −50 |
| Bed blocks a doorway on the headboard wall | −40 |
| Headboard sits under a window | −30 |
| Head points to one of your four favorable directions | +30, +24, +20 or +16 |
| Head points to one of your four unfavorable directions | −30, −24, −20 or −14 |
| Bathroom behind the headboard | −25 |
| Beam over the head of the bed | −22 |
| Bed crowds the door swing in a corner | −20 |
| Door visible from the bed and not in line with it | +15 |
| Walking space on both sides | +12 |
| Door off to the side and still in view | +10 |
| One side of the bed jammed against a wall | −8 |
Read that as an opinion with arithmetic attached, because that is what it is. The choice to let the door alignment penalty outweigh anything the compass can award is a choice. So is treating a beam as milder than a bathroom. Someone else’s weighting would reorder the same list of positions, and they would not be wrong.
This is why the generator prints the findings for each position rather than a single number in a circle. The findings are checkable: the door either lines up with the bed or it does not, the headboard either has a wall behind it or a window. The order the positions arrive in is ours. The method page says the same thing about every other tool here.
None of this predicts anything. Eight Mansions describes where things go and which way they point, and that is the whole of what the tradition offers here. If your bed currently breaks four rules on this page and you sleep well, there is nothing to reconcile — the rules were never a forecast.