In terms of practicality, you don’t need to be an experienced home buyer or tenant to realize that a west facing house would have the to bear the brunt of the evening sun everyday.
This can be especially uncomfortable when the living room or bedroom is located on the facing side of the house.
If you are lucky, other buildings and structures might block the harsh reality of the west sun and put your house in the safety of the shade. But do you want to leave this down to luck?
The reality is that we often hear about home buyers commenting negatively about the west sunlight and never the east.
But does this match up well with the feng shui of a house that faces the west direction?
Feng shui bagua
As with the practice of feng shui on each house, the very fundamental concepts of the bagua map should be the first focal point.
This states that every directional sector of a property corresponds with a trigram which coincide with particular life aspects and specific individuals.
This can be summarized with the following.
- North for career and middle son (kan)
- South for recognition and middle daughter (li)
- East for health and eldest son (chen)
- West for family and youngest daughter (tui)
- Northeast for academics and youngest son (ken)
- Northwest for mentors and patriarch (chien)
- Southeast for wealth and eldest daughter (sun)
- Southwest for relationships and matriarch (kun)
So if the house has a single male resident, then the north west sector is a critical area of the house to take care of as is represents the male leader.
Should this corner of the house be cluttered in a mess or be where a toilet is, then the resident would possibly suffer from perpetual bad luck.
If the house is the home of a single female, then the south west segment of the house would be one of the feng shui priority sectors as it is associated with the female leader.
Should this area be afflicted, or even worse, be a missing corner of the house, then the female resident would generally suffer from never ending obstacles in life.
This also means that if a married couple lives in a house with a west facing, both the northwest and southwest needs to be clean and clear of clutter.
Something interesting to note for west facing homes is that the northwest and southwest, which is where the chien and kun trigrams reside respectively, would be situated at the two front corners of the premise.
This can play nicely into the floor plan as bathrooms are seldom built at the front facing of properties.
The same can be said of the kitchen which is usually built towards the back of the house. This automatically eliminates the potential affliction of fire at heaven’s gate.
If there are no children in this family unit, then all the directional sectors (except the northwest and southwest) can be used as toilets and storeroom without any direct negative implications on specific household members.
The life aspects that are afflicted by the location of toilets for example, can then be enhanced by other feng shui concepts such as…
8 mansions feng shui
The 8 mansions feng shui school of thought basically generates an energy map for a house based on it’s sitting direction.
For for a house that facing west, it would be sitting east.
Thus, the below 8 mansions energy would be plotted.
Amazingly, the 3 frontal sectors of the house consisting of northwest, west and southwest are bad energy sectors of 5G, JM and HH respectively.
Maybe feng shui has been warning us about the west sun since ancient times?
In this instance, It is best to look into more details on choosing a front door direction.
From this energy map, it can be said that if the kitchen is not located in the front area of the house, then the only sector of the house which it can be situated is the northeast. Otherwise, the stove would burn down all the auspicious chi that comes with the favorable sectors of SC, TY, YN, FW.
The sheng chi (SC) sector at the south is the area with the most prosperous energy. It should therefore take up part of the living room and preferably has a window that faces the south so that auspicious energy can enter that sector from the south.
The other favorable areas of TY, YN and FW are good areas to locate the bedrooms, dining areas, and activity rooms.
Let’s take a look at a flying star natal chart.
Flying star feng shui
For this exercise, we would assume that this is a house built during the period of 8 facing W3.
The below birth chart will then apply.
This chart actually presents a conflicting energy map against the findings of 8 mansions.
While this might sound undesirable on the surface, it also means that the bad sectors identified by 8 mansions are not all bad and contains auspicious chi as well.
This means it’s good or bad?
In this case, there is the highly auspicious 8-8 combination at the west which makes this a good area to locate the front door and living room as well. This also implies that remedies have to be put in place to subdue the strength of the JM energy.
The same can be said of the northwest and southwest as long as active remedies are put in place.
The north and southeast which was previously mentioned as good areas to locate bedrooms should only go ahead with such plans with the placement of cure to pacify the negative effects of the 2-5 combination of stars.
However, avoiding these areas as bedrooms would be the better choice as inhabitant can be bogged down with misfortune and sickness if the remedies are not done right.
If a bedroom must be located in one of these sectors, for example in the southeast, then the concept of the small taichi can be applied to micro-manage that space. So place a huge cupboard at the southeast corner of the southeast bedroom to sit on and suppress the 5-2 combination.
It must be said that this house is not going to be good for a middle son and eldest daughter as these are the trigrams that the 2-5 star combinations directly impact in this chart. It might be catastrophic if they end up sleeping in their respective directional sectors.
The south remains a very lucky area and apartments might actually have configurations that allow the front door to be located there.
The northeast remains a good location for the kitchen with the presence of the purple star 9. There just needs to be a presence of earth energy to harmonize the clash between the water and mountain star.
While this is a purely hypothetical example used in this discussion, without consideration for other potential factors such as landscape, I must conclude that this does not look like a good energy map for a house.
There are just too many mixed signals and remedies to put in place.
So if you are considering to buy a house with such a directional configuration, do spend some time taking a look at your alternatives before writing a check for that down payment.
Do be aware that the tables can sometimes be totally turned with a slight change in facing direction, or when the house was built during another period other than eight.
