Feng shui office desk direction

Facing, not pointing

This is the one place where desk advice and bed advice pull in opposite directions, and it is where calculators most often go wrong. A bed is judged by the direction the sleeper's head points toward, which for a headboard flat against a wall is the direction that wall faces. A desk is judged by the direction the person sitting at it looks.

So the same wall gives you opposite answers for the two pieces of furniture. Put a headboard against a north wall and the bed direction is north. Sit with your back to that same north wall and your desk direction is south. If you have read that your best direction is southeast and set your desk against the southeast wall, you have arranged to face northwest.

The tool asks for the room, not for a direction, so this cannot go wrong by accident. Each result states the wall the desk sits against, the way you end up looking, and the star that direction carries for your Kua number.

The rules being checked

• Solid support behind the chair. A wall, not a window and not a doorway.
• The door in view. You should see who comes in without sitting in the doorway's path — the command position.
• Not facing a blank wall at close range, which is the usual cost of pushing a desk into a corner.
• No beam over the chair.
• Room to get in and out on both sides of the desk.
• You face one of your four directions. This is the part that depends on your birth year.

A small room cannot satisfy all six. When that happens the tool names the rule it had to break instead of quietly dropping it.

Why your best direction may be out of reach

A desk parallel to a wall lets you face only four directions — the ones those four walls face. In a room square to the compass that is North, East, South and West, and the four diagonals are unavailable. Because a desk can sit against a wall in two ways, facing it or backing onto it, each of those four directions is reachable from two different walls, which is more freedom than a bed has. It does not create new directions, though.

This falls unevenly on the two groups, and in the opposite pattern to the bedroom. East group directions are North, South, East and Southeast, so a square room reaches three of the four. West group directions are Southwest, West, Northwest and Northeast, of which only West is cardinal — so in a square room a West group worker has exactly one favorable direction to face. If a window or a doorway rules out the wall that would give it, the tool says there is no position that satisfies both, rather than promoting whatever is left.

Home office, shared office, and what the direction is for

Eight Mansions assigns directions to a person, not to a job, so the calculation is the same whether the room is a study at home or a desk in an office. What changes is how much of it you control. If you cannot move the desk, the part of the result that still applies is which way your chair points — turning a desk ninety degrees inside the same footprint changes the direction you face and nothing else in the room.

Two people sharing a room with opposite group numbers cannot both face a favorable direction from the same wall, since one person's good directions are the other's bad ones. Run the tool once per person; where the answers conflict there is no arithmetic that resolves it.