Feng shui office layout, and the two questions people merge
Published 2026-08-20
Laying out an office under Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) means answering two questions that take different inputs and can disagree with each other:
- Which part of the building the office should occupy. This comes from the building’s sitting direction. It has nothing to do with who works in the room.
- Which way you should face while working. This comes from your birth year and sex, through your Kua number. It has nothing to do with the building.
Advice that gives you one number for “your office direction” has merged them. The two answers are frequently different, and neither overrides the other.
The sector question belongs to the building
Eight Mansions divides a home into eight 45-degree sectors set by real compass bearings, and a study or desk is one of the rooms it places. Our own rule for it reads: sustained concentration is treated the same way as sleep — put it in a good sector, then face a good direction while you are in it. Sources agree on that one; it is not a contested placement like the kitchen stove.
Which sectors count as good is fixed by the building, not by you. A home whose front faces south sits north, which makes it a Kan house, in the East group. Work out your own with the compass bagua, and read what a house gua is if the sitting-versus-facing part is new.
If you have a choice of rooms, this is the question that decides which room. If you do not — most people do not — it is information rather than an instruction, and the second question is the one you can still act on.
The facing question belongs to you
For a desk, the direction that counts is the one you look in while sitting at it. This is the opposite of the rule for a bed, which is judged by where the sleeper’s head points, and it is the single most common error in office feng shui writing. Backing onto the north wall has you facing south. Pushing the desk against that same north wall so you look at it has you facing north. Both arrangements are real and they give opposite answers, so the orientation has to be stated. There is a fuller treatment in a desk direction is the way you face.
The same room has different answers for different people
A 3.6 m by 3.0 m office, top wall facing north, a door in the bottom wall and a window in the top wall. Our desk tool ranks the best position for each direction you could face, and here it is for two occupants:
| You face | Kua 1 occupant | Kua 8 occupant |
|---|---|---|
| East | 98 — Tian Yi | 54 — Liu Sha |
| West | 64 — Huo Hai | 100 — Yan Nian |
| South | 82 — Yan Nian | 46 — Huo Hai |
| North | 70 — Fu Wei | 36 — Wu Gui |
Same room, same door, same window. The Kua 1 occupant’s best position is against the left wall; the Kua 8 occupant’s is against the right wall, the opposite side. The room does not have a correct layout. A person in it does.
Those numbers are our ordering, not the tradition’s. Eight Mansions names a direction Tian Yi or Liu Sha; it does not weigh that against a window behind your chair. Every weight we apply is published on the method page so you can disagree with the arithmetic and still use the findings.
What the room-level checks actually are
Alongside direction, the tool scores the things a layout can get right or wrong regardless of who sits there:
- Solid support behind the chair. A wall, not a window (−26) and not a doorway (−34).
- The door in view without sitting in its path. In view and off-axis earns +16; lined up straight down the doorway costs −20.
- What you are looking at. Facing into the room from a wall earns +14; facing a wall costs −18, and a further −8 if that wall is close enough that there is nothing to look at.
- No beam over the seat (−18), and room to get in and out on both sides (+6).
A small room cannot satisfy all of them at once. When that happens the tool names the rule it had to break rather than quietly dropping it, which is the whole reason the findings are listed separately from the ranking.
What this does not do
Eight Mansions describes where things go and which way you sit. It does not predict what happens to your work, your income or your career, and we make no such claim — see method and assumptions for where we stop. If you find an office layout guide that promises a career outcome, the promise is the author’s, not the tradition’s.