What Your Carpet Area Figure Can and Cannot Tell You About Vastu

Nothing about placement, and less about proportion than you would hope. Carpet area is not an input to the Vastu score our free check produces: the model reads each space's type and the compass zone it sits in, and there is no field anywhere in it for square feet. Two flats with the same rooms in the same zones score identically whether they are 600 sq ft or 1,600. And the figure cannot be converted into the one dimension the traditional Ayadi calculation does need — a perimeter — because an area does not determine a shape. Below, the same seven-space flat scored three times, and two flats of the same 1,150 sq ft that give opposite Ayadi verdicts.

This matters because the brochure number is usually the only dimension a flat buyer holds. Carpet, built-up and super built-up appear in every listing, and plenty of advice is written as if one of them were a Vastu input. None of them is.

What the score is computed from

The placement table our check scores against gives every room type a number out of 100 for each of the eight directions, and the verdicts are fixed bands: 90 and above is ideal, 70 to 89 good, 50 to 69 acceptable, below 50 avoid. Each room type also carries a share of the overall verdict — the main entrance 18%, the kitchen 16%, the master bedroom 13%, toilets 12%, down to 2% for a study or a utility. The score is the weighted average of those placement numbers.

So the inputs are: which spaces you have, and which zone each one sits in. That is all. Area has nowhere to enter.

Here is the consequence, measured on one ordinary 2BHK — main door north, kitchen south-east, master bedroom south-west, second bedroom north-west, living room north-east, toilet north, balcony east:

The same flat, same carpet area	Score	Largest single deduction
As drawn	88	north toilet, 9 points
Turned 45° (every space moves one zone clockwise)	69	north-east toilet, 13 points
Turned 90°	63	south-west kitchen, 11 points

The compass is worth a 25-point swing on that plan. The carpet area is worth zero. Nothing about the flat changed between those three rows except which way the drawing was pointing — same rooms, same sizes, same number of square feet. That is the whole argument for why the north arrow is the input a check cannot do without, and the square footage is the input it never asks for.

Does extra area help, then?

No, and it is worth seeing why, because "bigger is better" is a reasonable thing to assume and the arithmetic says otherwise. The score is an average, so adding rooms pulls it toward the quality of the rooms you add.

Take the 88-point flat above and add the four spaces extra carpet area usually buys — a store, a utility, a dining area and a study. Place them well (store south-west, utility south-east, dining west, study west) and the score is 88: unchanged. Place them badly (three of them crowded into the north-east) and it is 82. Extra area is neutral at best and a liability at worst. There is no row of the table it can add points to.

What the extra space does change is who gets blamed. That north toilet costs 9 points on the seven-space plan and 7 on the eleven-space one — the same toilet, in the same zone, with the same score of 45. The deficit is divided across a larger pool of weights, so each existing defect is reported as costing less. If you compare a free check on a 2BHK against one on a 3BHK, expect the same defect to look milder in the bigger flat. The flat is not better; the denominator is larger.

The proportion half: why the area figure cannot be inverted

The one place dimensions genuinely do decide a traditional verdict is Ayadi — the six values (Aaya, Vyaya, Yoni, Vara, Nakshatra, Tithi) our Aaya calculator derives from a building's perimeter, in angulas, at 1 angula = 3/4 inch. Aaya is the remainder of the perimeter times 8 divided by 12; the test traditionally sought is that Aaya exceeds Vyaya and that Yoni comes out odd.

An area figure cannot give you a perimeter. At 1,150 sq ft, the perimeter runs from 135.6 ft if the flat is square up to 156.6 ft at a 1:3 proportion and further still for a narrower plan — a 15% spread in exactly the quantity the calculation consumes. And the six remainders move with every single angula, so that spread is not a rounding concern. It covers every answer.

Two flats, both 1,150 sq ft to within a third of a square foot, sides to the nearest inch:

Flat	Perimeter	Aaya	Vyaya	Yoni	Aaya > Vyaya and Yoni odd?
33'11" × 33'11"	2,171 angulas	4	9	1	No — Aaya does not exceed Vyaya
35'9" × 32'2"	2,173 angulas	8	7	7	Yes

Two angulas apart — an inch and a half of shape — and the verdict flips. Sampling 4,000 proportions between 1:1 and 1:3 at that one area, 36% pass the test and 64% fail, and Yoni takes all eight of its possible values across them. One carpet-area figure is compatible with both answers, several times over.

Two smaller things worth knowing before you type anything into any Ayadi calculator, both checkable from the formulas:

• Aaya can only ever come out as 4, 8 or 12. Because 8 and 12 share a factor of 4, the other nine values are unreachable at every possible perimeter. A page that discusses what your Aaya of 5 or 7 means is discussing something the arithmetic cannot produce. (Tithi is similarly restricted to even values — 15 of its 30.)
• If both sides of your flat are whole feet, Yoni is always even. Whole-foot sides force the perimeter to a multiple of 8 angulas, which sends Yoni to 8 every time; across all 20,100 whole-foot rectangles up to 200 ft a side, it is odd in exactly none of them. That is a property of the unit conversion, not of your flat, and it is why traditional builders set out in angulas rather than feet.

So what should you ask the builder for?

Not a number. A floor plan with the north arrow on it. The plan carries the two things a check actually consumes — which spaces exist and where they sit on the compass — and the area figure carries neither. If you are choosing between two units in the same tower, the areas will be close and the orientations may differ by 90°, which the table above values at roughly 25 points.

You can run that for free: upload the plan to the free Vastu check, confirm which way north is and that the room labels are right, and you get the direction-wise zones and a score, with the rooms that cost the most points named. If you want the dimensions question answered separately, the Aaya calculator prints every multiplication and remainder so you can check the arithmetic by hand — but it needs the sides, not the area.

One honest limit: because the placement model has no size term, it also cannot tell you that a kitchen is uncomfortably small or a bedroom too narrow for the bed. Those are real questions about a flat — just not ones a zone table answers. For which instrument answers which question, see what each kind of Vastu tool can actually know.