Feng shui front door direction: what it actually sets
Published 2026-08-20
The compass direction of your front door is the one measurement the Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) house chart needs, and the chart it produces is named for the opposite direction. A front measured at 180° faces south, so the house sits north, and Eight Mansions calls that a Kan house. Facing is what you measure. Sitting is what the chart is built from.
That chart answers one question: which sector of the building each room falls in. It cannot tell you which way to sleep or which way to sit at a desk. Those come from a person’s birth year and sex, through the Kua number, and no door bearing changes them.
Facing goes in, sitting comes out
This is where free tools quietly diverge. The
compass bagua map asks for the bearing the front of the
building faces. Inside, houseFromFacing flips that 180° and hands the result to
houseFromSitting, which looks the gua up in a table keyed by the sitting direction: north gives 1,
southwest 2, east 3, southeast 4, northwest 6, west 7, northeast 8, south 9.
Two things follow. There is no 5 in that list, because 5 has no trigram — personal numbers need a substitution rule for it and buildings never do. And every one of the eight sectors is worked out from the sitting direction, which is why the same reading is sometimes published as “a house facing south” and sometimes as “a north-sitting house”. Those are the same building. The eight rows in full are in what is a house gua.
Practitioners split on which side is the front
Eight Mansions needs a facing side before it can do anything, and there is no single agreed rule for picking one. Two are both in wide use:
- The front door. The side with the main entrance, the address, the path from the street. This is the reading most texts assume, and it is what our tool’s wording implies.
- The most open or brightest side. The side with the view, the light, the water, the road — the active side, whether or not the door is in it. Practitioners who work this way will read a house whose door is tucked down a side path as facing the big windows instead.
We are not going to pick one for you. What we can say is how much the choice costs when the two candidates disagree:
- Candidates 90° apart — a door in the south wall, windows in the east wall. In four of the eight possible pairings all eight sectors change from favored to weak or the other way round; in the other four the favored set stays put and only the star names move.
- Candidates 180° apart — a street door at the front, a garden door at the back. All eight star names change every time. Whether the favored set also flips depends on the pair: north against south keeps it, and so does northeast against southwest, while east against west and southeast against northwest flip all eight.
So the split matters unevenly. If your two candidate fronts land in the same group, either choice keeps the same corners good. If they land in opposite groups, nothing about the layout survives the choice, and you have to settle it before you move anything.
The sector the door sits in is a second question
Two different questions about one door get run together constantly. The bearing of the front sets the whole chart. Where the door physically sits in the floor plan is then a placement question, judged like any other room. Eight Mansions treats the main door as wanting a favored sector, and treats it as the least negotiable placement on the plan, because it is the one thing you cannot move later.
For a plain rectangular home with the door in the facing wall, the two questions collide, and the answer is not the same in all eight houses.
| The front faces | House gua | Star in the facing sector | Favored? |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | Li house (離宅) | Yan Nian (延年) | Yes |
| Northeast | Kun house (坤宅) | Sheng Chi (生氣) | Yes |
| East | Dui house (兌宅) | Jue Ming (絕命) | No |
| Southeast | Qian house (乾宅) | Huo Hai (禍害) | No |
| South | Kan house (坎宅) | Yan Nian (延年) | Yes |
| Southwest | Gen house (艮宅) | Sheng Chi (生氣) | Yes |
| West | Zhen house (震宅) | Jue Ming (絕命) | No |
| Northwest | Xun house (巽宅) | Huo Hai (禍害) | No |
Four favored, four weak. In half the houses, a door in the middle of the facing wall is standing in a sector its own chart reads as weak. That is not a contradiction to fix — it is what the chart says, and it is a normal result for a normal house.
The back of the building behaves differently. In all eight charts the sitting sector reads as Fu Wei (伏位), the settled one. Every Eight Mansions house is favored at the back, by construction.
Measurement, and where a door is a bad place to stand
Sector edges fall 45° apart, at 22.5°, 67.5°, 112.5° and so on. A front measured at 22° reads as facing north, giving a Li house; at 24° it reads as facing northeast, giving a Kun house. Those two are in opposite groups, so every row of the sector table swaps.
A front door is also the worst spot in the building to hold a compass: steel door, steel frame, hinges, lock, sometimes a security screen. Stand well out from it and take the bearing more than once. The compass bagua tool flags any bearing within 3° of an edge, and that flag matters more than the table under it.
What the door direction does not decide
- Which way you face. Head of the bed, seat at a desk. Birth year, not building.
- The rules about doors lining up with things. A bed in line with the door, two doors facing each other — those come from the form school, which reads shapes and sight lines and never uses a bearing. Is it bad feng shui for your bed to line up with the door? covers that one separately.
- The nine-square grid. If what you have is a map you line up with the door instead of with north, you are holding the three-door bagua, which has no facing bearing and no house gua in it at all. See two things are called a bagua map.
And the standing limit: Eight Mansions names a sector and attaches a theme to it. It does not predict what happens to the people living there, and neither do we. Method and assumptions says where our tools stop.