Small bedroom feng shui: which rule do you give up?
Published 2026-08-19
In a bedroom around 2.5 meters on a side, the usual list of placement rules cannot all be satisfied at once. A 1.6 by 2.0 meter bed takes most of the floor and the rules start competing for what is left. So the useful question is not how to satisfy six rules. It is which one to give up.
Our answer, cheapest to give up first: walking space on one side of the bed, then the quality of the head direction, then a beam or a bathroom at the head of the bed, then the solid wall behind your head — and never the alignment with the door. The direction part comes from Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai), the compass-based school this site runs. The order is our judgment, and the rest of this article is where it comes from, so you can disagree with it.
What the generator returns for a room this size
Real output from the code behind the bedroom layout generator: a room 2.6 meters wide and 2.4 deep, top wall facing North, a 0.9 meter door centered on the south wall, a 1.6 by 2.0 meter bed, and an occupant who is Kua 1, East group, with North, East, Southeast and South as their four good directions.
| Headboard wall | Head points | Score | Verdict | What the tool reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right (east) | East | 80 | Workable | Good direction; door off to the side and in view |
| Left (west) | West | 46 | Compromised | Unfavorable direction; door off to the side and in view |
| Bottom (south) | South | 46 | Compromised | Good direction, but the bed blocks the doorway |
| Top (north) | North | 28 | Compromised | Good direction, but the bed lines up with the door |
Nothing here is rated a strong placement. The winner wins by collecting the fewest objections, not by passing everything — and the wall facing the strongest direction this room can reach, South, is one of the two the door rules out.
The clearances that decide it
The generator uses two thresholds, both in src/lib/bedroom.ts:
- 0.45 meters — the clearance it treats as walking space. A position gets credit only when both sides of the bed have at least this much.
- 0.15 meters — below this, it reports one side of the bed as jammed against a wall.
Those two numbers explain the table. A 1.6 meter bed needs a wall 2.5 meters long to leave 0.45 meters on both sides, and both side walls here are 2.4 meters, so the bed sits about 0.20 meters off one wall — short of the credit, above the jammed threshold, and so not mentioned at all. In a small room the absence of a line is information too.
The same 0.45 meters applies to depth: a headboard wall needs 2.45 meters in front of it before the tool credits the door with staying in view. This room clears that by 15 centimeters. Shrink it to 2.4 by 2.4 meters and the top position falls from 80 to 70, reporting the direction and nothing else.
The order we drop things in
The generator’s penalties are the ranking, stated as numbers:
| What goes wrong | Penalty |
|---|---|
| Bed in line with the door, foot pointing at it | −50 |
| Bed blocking the doorway on its own wall | −40 |
| Headboard under a window | −30 |
| Bathroom behind the headboard | −25 |
| Beam over the head of the bed | −22 |
| Bed crowding the door swing in a corner | −20 |
| One side of the bed jammed against a wall | −8 |
Head direction is scored separately, from +16 to +30 for one of your four good directions and −14 to −30 for one of the other four.
So a jammed side costs 8 and is worth trading for any of your four good directions, since the cheapest of those is worth 16. A window behind the headboard costs 30, which cancels the strongest direction outright, so that trade is close to a wash. Both door problems cost more than any direction is worth, which is why nothing buys them.
These weights are our judgment, not tradition. Eight Mansions sources agree on which things to watch and put no numbers on them. A practitioner who rates an exposed beam worse than a window is not making a mistake, just ordering the same list differently — which is why the tool lists the findings for every position and not only for the winner.
Door position matters more than floor area
Two runs on the identical 2.6 by 2.4 meter room, changing nothing but where the door sits on the south wall. Centered, the south wall scores 46 and the north wall 28. Moved to the corner of the same wall, the south wall scores 66 and the north wall 73, both workable: the bed now slides past the door instead of standing in it, and the north wall earns the command position credit, meaning the door is in view without the bed in its path.
Same floor area, and the door’s position is worth 45 points on the north wall. A 3.0 by 2.7 meter room with the door on the west wall returns a 96 for the same occupant, a strong placement — 40 centimeters wider and 30 deeper is enough once the door is out of the way.
The lever the rule lists never mention
Bed width changes more than anything else in a small room, and no traditional list mentions it. Swap the 1.6 meter bed for a 1.0 meter single:
| Room | 1.6 m bed | 1.0 m bed |
|---|---|---|
| 2.6 × 2.4 m, East group occupant | 80, workable | 92, strong |
| 2.6 × 2.4 m, West group occupant | 76, workable | 88, workable |
| 2.4 × 2.2 m, East group occupant | 62, compromised | 82, workable |
Nothing traditional is happening here. A narrower bed clears 0.45 meters on both sides, so the position collects credit it otherwise cannot reach. The generator lets you set bed width for that reason. Whether a single bed is an acceptable answer to your housing is not a tool’s call.
The limit no compromise gets around
One constraint is not a trade-off at all. A headboard flat against a wall can point at only the four directions those walls face — North, East, South and West in a room square to the compass. The four diagonals are unreachable, and Eight Mansions splits people so that this lands unevenly:
- East group (Kua 1, 3, 4, 9): three of the four good directions are cardinal, and only one wall in the room points somewhere unfavorable.
- West group (Kua 2, 6, 7, 8): exactly one good direction is cardinal, and it is West for all four. Three of the four walls point at an unfavorable direction.
Which star that one West wall carries depends on the number: Tian Yi (天醫) for Kua 2, Sheng Chi (生氣) for Kua 6, Fu Wei (伏位) for Kua 7, Yan Nian (延年) for Kua 8. The Kua number calculator gives yours, and which direction should the head of your bed face covers how the four are assigned.
That is easy to check. Put the window on the west wall of the same 2.6 by 2.4 meter room and run it for Kua 7, West group: all four positions come back compromised, the best at 46 — the west wall, window behind the headboard. No arrangement of a small square room fixes it. The choice left is to angle the bed away from the wall, giving up the solid headboard for the direction, or to accept a direction that is not one of yours.
What this does not tell you
Eight Mansions assigns a name to each direction for each person. It does not predict what happens to you in a small room or a large one, and neither do we — see method and assumptions for what the tool computes and where it stops. The scores are a way of showing which rules a position breaks, in an order we have written down. They measure nothing.