Bagua map: how to lay the feng shui grid on your own room

Type your room's width and length as they sit on your floor plan, and choose the wall with the door. The tool draws the room to scale with the 3 × 3 bagua grid over it, names the nine areas, and lists what the tradition suggests for each. Switch to the compass method if you follow a classical teacher.

Where the bagua comes from

The bagua (literally "eight symbols") is the eight trigrams of the I Ching, the Chinese classic of changes, set round a centre. Each trigram is three lines, broken or whole, with an image from nature: heaven, earth, water, fire, thunder, wind, mountain and lake. Homes use the arrangement called Later Heaven, which gives each trigram a compass direction. The numbers 1 to 9 come from the Lo Shu, an old magic square.

Feng shui itself began with the siting of tombs and houses, and its classical schools place the bagua by compass. The 3 × 3 grid laid from the door comes from a newer school, Black Sect Tantric Buddhist (BTB), founded by Thomas Lin Yun. He met the writer Sarah Rossbach in Hong Kong in 1977, and her books carried his method into Western homes in the 1980s. The anthropologist Ole Bruun writes that feng shui took "a new guise" in Europe and America. Both methods are shown here, each named, because their teachers do not agree.

We report what the tradition says. We do not claim that an area brings wealth, love or health, and nobody has shown that it does.

How to use a bagua map: the door-wall method (BTB)

1. Stand in the doorway of the room and look in.
2. Measure the room's width (across) and length (away from you), skirting to skirting.
3. Split both into thirds. You now have nine areas, each a third by a third.
4. The row along the door wall is the front row: Knowledge on your left, Career in the middle, Helpful People on your right.
5. The far row is Wealth (far left), Fame (far middle) and Relationships (far right). Family, the Centre and Children fill the middle row.

For a whole home, BTB lays one big grid from the front door instead, over the outline of the flat or house. You can do both: one grid for the home, one for each room.

The compass method

Classical schools keep the bagua fixed to the compass. Career is always the north side of the room, Fame the south, whichever wall has the door. To lay it:

1. Stand in the doorway and take a compass reading of the way you face as you walk in (on an iPhone, turn on True North in the Compass settings).
2. Round it to the nearest of the eight directions. The middle of the far wall is that direction from the centre of the room.
3. Place the area for that direction there, then go round the room clockwise, 45° to a cell: N Career, NE Knowledge, E Family, SE Wealth, S Fame, SW Relationships, W Children, NW Helpful People.

If you walk in facing south, the compass grid and the BTB grid match exactly. Classical teachers divide a plan into eight 45° sectors from its centre, or 24 of 15°, not a 3 × 3 grid, so the tool's compass grid is a simplification. It turns the grid to the nearest 45°.

The nine areas, and what the tradition suggests

Teachers name some areas differently: Wealth is also called Abundance, and Career is also called Path in Life. mindbodygreen adds water to Knowledge and fire to Relationships. The table follows Cho and Gordon where they agree.

Grid sizes for common UK rooms

Each area is a third of the width by a third of the length. Our arithmetic, rounded to the centimetre:

In a box room, an area is smaller than a single bed (90 × 190 cm), so one piece of furniture often spans two or three areas. The tradition reads that as normal: the grid is a guide to where things lean, not a set of walls. For what fits in a small room at all, see box room ideas, with measurements.

How to measure for the grid

1. Measure each wall at floor level, skirting to skirting. Use the longest width and the longest length if the walls are not quite square.
2. Ignore a chimney breast or a small alcove: the grid covers the whole rectangle.
3. Mark the thirds with masking tape on the floor if you want to see them. Two strips across and two deep are enough.
4. For the compass method, take the reading in the doorway, away from radiators and metal door frames.

Common mistakes

• Turning the grid to face the window. In BTB the front row is always the door wall, even when the room's best view is the other way.
• Mixing the methods. BTB from the door and the compass method give different areas unless you walk in facing south. Pick one and say which.
• Using the front door's grid for a room. BTB lays a room's grid from that room's own door.
• Making the room worse to fill an area. A plant that blocks the walkway or a desk wedged into a corner costs more than any tradition offers. Designers keep a 75–90 cm walkway past furniture, and 45–60 cm where space is tight.
• Treating it as a promise. The areas are associations. Nobody has shown that a plant in Wealth changes anything about money.

Where the schools disagree

For the bed itself, most schools agree on one thing: the commanding position, where you see the door from the bed without lying in line with it. Our feng shui bedroom layout guide draws it in real UK rooms.

Try the tradition's ideas in your own room

Snuug, the iPhone room app, rebuilds your room in 3D from one slow walk round it, to within about 3% of its real size in our tests of ten homes. That gives you the real wall lengths to lay the grid on your own floor plan, without a tape measure. Then use your Snuug room to try the tradition's ideas: move the desk into Knowledge, a lamp into Fame or the bed along the far wall in 5 cm steps, and see whether the walkway and the door's swing still work before you lift anything. Our team checks every room by hand, and your first room is free.

Questions

How do I use a bagua map?

In the Western BTB method, stand in the room's doorway and look in. Split the room into three equal strips across and three deep, so you have nine areas. The row along the door wall is, from left to right, Knowledge, Career and Helpful People; the middle row Family, Centre and Children; the far row Wealth, Fame and Relationships. Then the tradition suggests colours and objects for each area.

Do you start the bagua map from the front door or the room door?

Both, in BTB. For the whole home, lay the grid from the front door. For one room, lay it from that room's door. The classical compass method ignores doors and uses the compass instead.

What if my door is in the corner of the room?

Then it falls in Knowledge (a door on the left of the wall as you face in) or Helpful People (on the right). The grid itself does not move: it always covers the whole room, with the door wall as the front row.

Which way up does the bagua map go?

In BTB, the Career side always goes on the wall with the door, whichever compass direction that wall faces. In the compass method, Career goes on the north side, whichever wall has the door.

What if my room is L-shaped?

Lay the grid over the full rectangle that contains the room. BTB calls a cell that falls outside the floor a missing area, and teachers suggest a light, a mirror or a plant on the inside wall to complete it. Classical teachers see it as a layout issue, common in modern homes.

Does the bagua map actually work?

Nobody has shown that it does. Feng shui is a tradition, and even its schools disagree: classical teacher Joey Yap says paint colour has no feng shui effect, while BTB uses colour as a main tool. Many people use the map as a gentle way to decide where things go.

Editorial notes

Written by the Snuug team and checked on 1 November 2026. A number with no source beside it is a designers' rule of thumb, not a study.

1. Anjie Cho, Feng shui 101: the bagua map (the nine areas and how to lay the grid from the door), read 17 Oct 2026
2. Anjie Cho, Q&A Sunday: BTB feng shui bagua (BTB from the door, classical by compass), read 17 Oct 2026
3. Marianne Gordon, How to use a feng shui bagua map, mindbodygreen, 8 Feb 2020 (areas, colours, both methods), read 17 Oct 2026
4. Wikipedia, Bagua (the eight trigrams, the Later Heaven arrangement and its directions), read 17 Oct 2026
5. Wikipedia, Feng shui (history, the Form and Compass branches, scientific status), read 17 Oct 2026
6. Joey Yap, The facts and myths about 8 feng shui factors, Her World, 15 Mar 2020 (paint colour has no feng shui effect), read 17 Oct 2026
7. Wu, S.-J. (2019), Feng shui: a comparison of the original concept and its current westernized version, M.Arch. thesis, RIT. We read the abstract
8. Bruun, O. (2008), An Introduction to Feng Shui, Cambridge University Press (feng shui in the West). We read an excerpt
9. SCMP, interview with Thomas Lin Yun and Sarah Rossbach's meeting in Hong Kong in 1977. We read a search summary only
10. LoveToKnow, Feng shui bagua for difficult floor plans (missing areas). We read a search summary only

Use this from an AI assistant

This answer as JSON, or as one paragraph with format=text: https://snuug.app/api/v1/tools/bagua-map

MCP server: https://snuug.app/mcp · OpenAPI · llms.txt. Every rule cites its source.