Which room should be the master bedroom?
Published 2026-08-20
Which room becomes the master bedroom is a question about location — which part of the building the room sits in — and Eight Mansions answers it from the building’s sitting direction. Your birth year does not enter into it. Your birth year answers the other question, which way your head points once the bed is in the room, and mixing the two is the most common error on pages that cover this.
Two questions, two different inputs
| Question | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Which room should be the bedroom? | The building’s sitting direction | Which of the eight sectors suit a bedroom |
| Which way should the head of the bed point? | The occupant’s birth year | Four favorable and four unfavorable directions |
Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) is the compass school this site runs, and it keeps these on separate charts. A page that tells you which corner of your home should be the master bedroom based on your birthday has merged two charts that the tradition does not merge. The three-door bagua (BTB, or Black Sect) answers the location question a third way, from the position of the front door and with no compass at all, and it is not what any of the sectors below come from.
Start from the sitting direction, not the facing one
Facing is the direction the front of the building looks out on — usually the side with the main entrance, or the main view where those differ. Sitting is the opposite 180°, and the house is named after the sitting side. Take the bearing outside, away from the building’s steel, and take it more than once.
| Sitting | Facing | House | Gua | Group |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North | South | Kan house | 1 | East |
| Northeast | Southwest | Gen house | 8 | West |
| East | West | Zhen house | 3 | East |
| Southeast | Northwest | Xun house | 4 | East |
| South | North | Li house | 9 | East |
| Southwest | Northeast | Kun house | 2 | West |
| West | East | Dui house | 7 | West |
| Northwest | Southeast | Qian house | 6 | West |
Run all eight through this site’s house tables and the sectors collapse into two sets. An East group house — sitting north, east, southeast or south — treats North, East, Southeast and South as its four favorable sectors. A West group house treats Northeast, Southwest, West and Northwest as its four. In both cases the house’s four favorable sectors are the four directions in the same group as its own sitting direction, so once you know the sitting direction you know the answer.
Our room rules put the master bedroom in one of those four favorable sectors, and this is not a contested point: the reason given is that a bedroom is where you spend the most unbroken hours, so it belongs in a sector the house treats well. The compass bagua map prints the same list for a bathroom and for storage the other way round — those want the weak sectors, on the reasoning that a good sector given to a room nobody occupies is wasted.
The four favorable sectors are not interchangeable
The tradition does not just mark four sectors good. It names each one, and the name changes house to house. For a Li house — one sitting south, facing north — our tables give:
| Sector | Li house reading |
|---|---|
| North | Yan Nian (延年), associated with relationships and longevity |
| Northeast | Huo Hai (禍害) — weak |
| East | Sheng Chi (生氣), associated with prosperity and momentum |
| Southeast | Tian Yi (天醫), associated with health and recovery |
| South | Fu Wei (伏位), associated with stability and clear thinking |
| Southwest | Liu Sha (六煞) — weak |
| West | Wu Gui (五鬼) — weak |
| Northwest | Jue Ming (絕命) — weak |
Those themes are what the tradition associates with each name. They are not predictions, and we are not presenting them as any. Our own tool goes no further than favorable or weak — it reports the name for each sector but does not rank the four against each other for a bedroom, because we have no basis for saying Sheng Chi beats Tian Yi for that purpose. Choosing among the four is yours.
Two degrees can move every row
Sectors are 45° wide, so their edges fall at 22.5°, 67.5° and so on. A building whose front reads 22° comes out as a Li house, gua 9, East group. Read the same front as 24° and it is a Kun house, gua 2, West group — and because the two are in opposite groups, all eight sectors invert. The four rooms you were about to call favorable become the four you would rather give to storage.
That is why the near-the-edge warning is the most useful output on our compass page. If your bearing sits within a few degrees of an edge, the answer is not “close enough”; it is that you need a better bearing before you plan anything.
Your own chart is a second layer, and it may disagree
Once you know the house sectors you can lay your own Kua number over them, and the two layers do not always agree. We ran all 64 combinations of the eight house guas against the eight Kua numbers:
- Same group as the house. Four sectors are favorable on both layers, and four are weak on both. No sector splits.
- Opposite group to the house. Every one of the eight sectors splits. There is no sector that is favorable on both layers, because a person’s four favorable directions and their opposite group’s four are complete opposites — the overlap is zero, in every pairing.
If you belong to the opposite group from your house, no room in the building satisfies both layers, and nothing in Eight Mansions ranks one layer above the other. Our tool shows both columns side by side and says where they disagree, which is as far as the arithmetic goes. Practitioners differ on what to do next, and we are not going to pick for them.
When a room straddles two sectors
The sectors are wedges drawn from the center of the plan, and rooms do not respect them. A large bedroom in a small home routinely covers two, sometimes three. Our compass page gives the reading for each sector; it does not take a floor plan, so it cannot tell you which sector a particular room is “in”, and it will not pretend to. Working that out means finding the center of the plan, taking bearings to the room, and deciding for yourself what to do with a room that lands across a boundary. An irregular or L-shaped plan makes even the center point a judgment call.
Location answers a different question than direction
Eight Mansions names a sector favorable or weak. It does not predict what happens to whoever sleeps there, and neither do we — see method and assumptions for what we compute and where we stop. And once the room is chosen, the direction question is still open: which way the head of the bed points comes from the occupant’s birth year, and that is a separate calculation.