What is a house gua, and how do you find yours?
Published 2026-08-20
A house gua is the name Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) gives a building, and it comes from one measurement: the compass direction the building sits in. Sitting is the opposite of facing, so a house that faces south sits north, and Eight Mansions calls that a Kan house. Eight sitting directions, eight house guas.
The number matters because it is what the compass school uses to decide where rooms go. It is not your own Kua number and it does not come from your birth year.
The eight houses
Facing is the direction the front of the building looks out on — usually the side with the main entrance, or the side with the main view where those differ. Sitting is 180° from that. Each sector is 45° wide.
| The front faces | Bearing | So the house sits | House gua |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | 337.5°–22.5° | South | Li house (離宅), gua 9, East group |
| Northeast | 22.5°–67.5° | Southwest | Kun house (坤宅), gua 2, West group |
| East | 67.5°–112.5° | West | Dui house (兌宅), gua 7, West group |
| Southeast | 112.5°–157.5° | Northwest | Qian house (乾宅), gua 6, West group |
| South | 157.5°–202.5° | North | Kan house (坎宅), gua 1, East group |
| Southwest | 202.5°–247.5° | Northeast | Gen house (艮宅), gua 8, West group |
| West | 247.5°–292.5° | East | Zhen house (震宅), gua 3, East group |
| Northwest | 292.5°–337.5° | Southeast | Xun house (巽宅), gua 4, East group |
Two things about that table. You pick the row by facing bearing but read the name out of the sitting column, because the house is named for the side it backs onto. And there is no Kua 5 house — 5 has no trigram and no direction of its own, so the eight sitting directions map onto 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 with nothing left over. Personal numbers need a substitution rule for 5. Buildings never do.
What the gua gives you
Once the gua is fixed, so are the eight sectors of the house. Four are treated as favored and four as weak, and each one carries a named star. Here is the full set for a Kan house — the one that faces south and sits north:
| Sector | Kan house reads it as |
|---|---|
| North | Fu Wei (伏位), favored — stability and clear thinking |
| Northeast | Wu Gui (五鬼), weak — restlessness and disputes |
| East | Tian Yi (天醫), favored — health and recovery |
| Southeast | Sheng Chi (生氣), favored — prosperity and momentum |
| South | Yan Nian (延年), favored — relationships and longevity |
| Southwest | Jue Ming (絕命), weak — the most draining direction |
| West | Huo Hai (禍害), weak — small mishaps and irritation |
| Northwest | Liu Sha (六煞), weak — conflict and loss |
Those themes are the labels the tradition attaches to each star. They are not predictions, and nothing on this site treats them as any.
The split is never scattered. East group houses — Li, Kan, Zhen and Xun — hold their four favored sectors at north, east, southeast and south. West group houses — Kun, Dui, Qian and Gen — hold theirs at northeast, southwest, west and northwest. So knowing the group tells you the four sectors before you know which of the four stars sits where.
The arithmetic is also the same arithmetic used on people. A house sitting north and a person of Kua 1 come out with an identical set of eight sectors, because both are worked from the same seat direction. That is why the two layers can be compared at all.
Two degrees is enough to change the answer
Sector edges fall at 22.5°, 67.5°, 112.5° and so on. A front measured at 22° reads as facing north, which makes it a Li house sitting south. At 24° the same front reads as facing northeast, which makes it a Kun house sitting southwest. Those are different guas in different groups, and every row in the sector table flips.
So take the bearing outside, away from the steel in the building, and take it more than once. The compass bagua map warns you when a bearing lands within 3° of an edge, and that warning is worth more than the table underneath it.
Location is not direction
Eight Mansions answers two separate questions and uses a different input for each.
- Where in the home should this room be? Which corner gets the bedroom, which corner gets the bathroom. This uses the building’s sitting direction — the house gua.
- Which way should a person face? The head of a bed, the seat at a desk. This uses that person’s birth year, through the Kua number calculator.
Conflating the two is the most common error in free tools. A house gua cannot tell you which way to sleep, and a birth year cannot tell you which corner of the building is which.
When you and the house are in different groups
Houses sort into the same East and West groups as people, and there is no rule that they match. If you are a West group person in an East group house, every one of the eight sectors disagrees between the two layers. Eight Mansions contains nothing that settles it. In practice most practitioners follow the house for where rooms go and the person’s own chart for which way they face, on the grounds that furniture moves and walls do not. See method and assumptions for where our tools stop.
If what you found was a nine-square grid that you line up with your front door instead of with a compass, there is no house gua in it at all — that is the three-door bagua, a separate system with separate answers. Which one you are holding is worked out in two things are called a bagua map.