How to Find Your House Facing Direction

Your house's facing direction is the one input that fixes the entire Flying Star chart. A bearing off by one direction bucket produces a chart for a different house. This guide covers taking a reading with a phone compass, the magnetic vs true north question, and the balcony-or-door problem in apartments.

Facing and Sitting

Classical feng shui describes a house with two directions. The facing (向, xiàng) is the direction the house looks toward, the side with the door, light, and open space. The sitting (坐, zuò) is the back, exactly 180 degrees away. A house facing south sits north. Chinese notation puts sitting first: 坐北朝南 reads as sitting north, facing south.

The two form one axis, and Flying Star charts are named by it: "sitting north, facing south" picks out one chart family per period. You measure one end of the axis. The calculator takes your facing reading and derives the sitting direction on its own.

How to Measure With a Phone Compass

Your phone's compass app does the same job as the traditional luopan: it reads the direction you face in degrees. Technique matters more than the tool.

1. Stand inside the front door with your body turned toward it, looking outside.
2. Hold the phone flat at chest height, screen up, and wait for the needle to settle.
3. Read the bearing in degrees, where 0° is north and 90° is east. Write it down.
4. Walk about three meters deeper into the house and take a second reading. Then step through the door, walk two paces out, and take a third.
5. Compare the three numbers. If they agree within a few degrees, average them. If they disagree, use the outdoor reading.

Steel doors, rebar in concrete walls, parked cars, wiring, and electronics pull the needle off true. Three readings at three distances from the structure expose the interference, and the spot two steps outside the door has the least metal around it. If the needle sticks or the app shows a calibration warning, wave the phone through the air in a figure-8 pattern and take the readings again.

Magnetic North vs. True North

Phone compasses point to magnetic north. True north, the axis of the Earth's rotation, sits a few degrees away, and the gap, called declination, varies by location and drifts year to year.

Classical feng shui accepts the magnetic reading, because the luopan itself is a magnetic instrument. Practitioners have read bearings as the compass gives them for centuries. A minority school converts readings to true north using the local declination value. NOAA publishes a public-domain declination model that returns this number for any coordinate, and our methodology page states which convention this calculator follows.

Pick one school and apply it to each reading you take. Each direction bucket spans 15 degrees, and declination in most inhabited places stays under 10 degrees, so both conventions land in the same bucket for most houses. Charts go wrong when readings mix the two conventions.

Apartments: Balcony or Front Door?

Landed houses have an obvious front. Apartments split practitioners into two schools.

The door school holds that qi enters through the mouth of the house, the front door, as it has through centuries of feng shui practice. The balcony school answers that in a high-rise, the front door opens onto a sealed interior corridor with no sky, no wind, and no view, while light and air arrive through the largest glass face.

A working rule covers most homes:

• Landed houses, townhouses, and walk-up apartments: use the front door.
• Apartments roughly above the third floor whose door opens onto an interior hallway: use the balcony or the largest window wall.
• If your apartment door opens to the outdoors or an open-air corridor, treat it like a landed house.

Once you pick the facing wall, the rest of the analysis runs the same way. Our apartment feng shui guide covers how to apply the chart to a single unit.

Common Mistakes

• Measuring beside a parked car, metal gate, or fuse box. The needle points at the metal.
• Taking one reading and stopping there. Three readings are how you catch interference.
• Reporting the bedroom window's direction. The facing belongs to the whole house, and bedrooms rarely face the same way as the front.
• Confusing facing with door position. A door on the south side of a house can face north. Facing is the direction you look when you stand in the doorway and face out.

From Degrees to Directions

Compass bearings run clockwise from north: 0° is north, 90° is east, 180° is south, and 270° is west. The eight directions of feng shui divide the circle into 45° wedges, each centered on its cardinal point.

A reading of 172° falls in the South bucket, so the house faces south and sits north. Classical practice divides the circle further into the 24 mountains (二十四山), 15° slices that split each 45° wedge into three. The mountain ring on a luopan is this system. This calculator works with the eight cardinal directions, the layer most home analyses use.