A Bathroom in the North-West: The Only Direction the Table Calls Ideal
North-west is the only ideal cell in the toilet row — 90 of 100. The north, one zone away, scores 45 and reads avoid. The full ranking and what the gap costs.
Author - Vaastu AI Editorial
Put the toilet in the north-west. On the table our free check scores against it is the only cell in the entire bathroom row that reads ideal — 90 out of 100, and nothing else in the row reaches 90. West (85) and south (75) are next and both read good. The north-east is the worst compass cell at 15, and the centre of the plan is worse still at 10.
Most Vastu writing agrees on that much, though it usually hedges. What almost nobody separates is the north-west from the north: a toilet in the north scores 45, inside the avoid band. Those two zones share a boundary, so in a flat the difference between the best toilet placement available and one the model penalises can be a few feet of wall.
The full ranking
The bathroom row, unaltered, with the verdict each score earns:
| Direction | Score | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| North-West | 90 | Ideal |
| West | 85 | Good |
| South | 75 | Good |
| South-East | 65 | Acceptable |
| East | 55 | Acceptable |
| South-West | 50 | Acceptable |
| North | 45 | Avoid |
| North-East | 15 | Avoid |
| Centre | 10 | Avoid |
Two things in that column are worth more than the ordering.
First, the ideal is a single cell sitting exactly on the band floor. A score of 90 is the lowest number that earns the word ideal; 89 would read good. Six of the fourteen room types have exactly one ideal cell — kitchen, master bedroom, staircase, store, garage and toilet — and 90 is the lowest value any of the six takes. A kitchen in the south-east and a master bedroom in the south-west both score 100; a staircase in the south-west scores 95; a toilet in the north-west scores 90 and stops. Across the whole 14 × 8 compass table only 20 of 112 cells are ideal at all, so the toilet is not being singled out — but a "perfect" toilet sits at the edge of the word rather than in the middle of it.
Second, the drop from north-west to north is 45 points. Only two adjacent-zone gaps anywhere in the table are larger: a pooja room loses 55 from east to south-east, a master bedroom 50 from south-east to south. A kitchen loses the same 45 on the same north-west/north edge. That boundary is a genuinely sharp one, and the toilet sits right on it.
The north is not the north-west
If you have read that "north or north-west is fine for a toilet," you have probably read two claims blurred into one. Much of the published advice about the north and a toilet is about which way you face while using it — seat orientation — not which zone of the plan the room occupies. Our check does not model seat orientation at all. It grades the zone, and on that question the north reads avoid at 45: below the south-west (50), the east (55) and the south-east (65). Only the north-east and the centre score worse.
The two sit in the same article without anyone noticing they answer different questions. If what you want to know is where do I put the toilet, the answer here is north-west, then west, then south — and the north is not in that group.
What a bad one actually costs
The other half of the picture is how much comes back once you have done what can be done without breaking anything, and for a toilet the answer is "not much." Our model recovers 45% of a toilet's deficit — the same fraction it gives a kitchen, and roughly half the 85% it gives rooms that are mostly a matter of use and furniture, because wet rooms are anchored to plumbing. Recovery is only modelled below 70, on the grounds that nothing above that needs fixing.
| Toilet in | Score | Verdict | After remedies | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North-West | 90 | Ideal | — (nothing modelled) | Ideal |
| West | 85 | Good | — (nothing modelled) | Good |
| South | 75 | Good | — (nothing modelled) | Good |
| South-East | 65 | Acceptable | 80.8 | Good |
| East | 55 | Acceptable | 75.3 | Good |
| South-West | 50 | Acceptable | 72.5 | Good |
| North | 45 | Avoid | 69.8 | Acceptable |
| North-East | 15 | Avoid | 53.3 | Acceptable |
| Centre | 10 | Avoid | 50.5 | Acceptable |
The north row is the one to look at twice. A north toilet remedies to 69.8 — two tenths of a point below the line that would make it good. That is what a 45% recovery fraction does to a 45-point cell, and it is the clearest illustration in the table of why placement matters more than remedy. A north-east toilet, the placement everybody writes about, comes back to 53.3 and stops in acceptable. Neither reaches the band a north-west toilet starts in.
One more consequence most readers meet without knowing why: when our free check counts how many of your faults are fixable at home, it only counts a room whose recovery fraction is 0.8 or better. A toilet's is 0.45, so a toilet in the avoid band is never counted as fixable at home — not because nothing can be done, but because the model will not pretend that what can be done closes the gap.
What the difference is worth on your score
An ordinary 2BHK — main door north, kitchen south-east, master bedroom south-west, second bedroom north-west, living room north-east, pooja east. Change nothing but where the toilet sits.
| Toilet in | Score | Reachable with remedies |
|---|---|---|
| North-West | 95 | 95 |
| North | 88 | 92 |
| North-East | 84 | 89 |
Eleven points between the best and the worst of those three, on an otherwise identical and otherwise excellent plan. The toilet carries a weight of 0.12, fourth-heaviest of all room types — behind the main entrance (0.18), kitchen (0.16) and master bedroom (0.13), ahead of the pooja room (0.09) and living room (0.08). In the seven-room set above that is 14.5% of the verdict, a swing of 10.8 points. Most checklists in this genre rank the living room well above the toilet; the model does the opposite.
If you are choosing, and if you are not
If you are choosing — buying off-plan, or laying out a floor — this reduces to one line: north-west, then west, then south, and treat the north as a compromise rather than a safe option. Take the bearing with the Vastu compass first, because every number here is a 45-degree sector measured from true north, and a 10-to-20-degree error can move a boundary room into the next zone entirely. The north-west/north edge is exactly the kind of boundary a sloppy bearing crosses.
If you are not choosing — the plumbing is in the slab — find out what it actually scores before you spend anything. A south-east toilet at 65 reads acceptable and remedies to good: an ordinary home, not a problem to solve. A north-east one is the hard case, and what to do with a toilet in the north-east covers it separately, including the colour guidance the model itself endorses for a wet room below 50.
What this table does not grade
The check grades which zone a room falls in, and nothing else. Not the seat's orientation, the door or mirror position, whether the toilet shares a wall with the kitchen or sits above the pooja room, the floor slope, or where the drain runs — all real questions in the traditional literature, none of them an input here. Nor does the check read the plan unaided: it detects the rooms, and you confirm north and the labels before anything is scored, which is why a wrong bearing invalidates everything downstream.
The table is a published, checkable model rather than scripture. Whether a north-west toilet is auspicious is not a question it answers; what it answers is where this model puts it relative to every other option.
To see which zone each room in your own plan lands in, upload it to the free Vastu check. You get the direction-wise zones and a score, and the toilet will be one of the rooms carrying the most weight in it.