Which Rooms Can Never Be “Ideal” in Vastu — and Why That Is Fine

Short answer: in the placement table our check runs on, three of the fourteen room types can never be graded ideal, in any of the nine zones. They are the second or guest bedroom (best cell: north-west, 84), the dining area (west, 85) and the utility or wash area (south-east, 85). The band that starts at 90 is simply out of reach for all three, so the best verdict any of them can earn is good. That is not a defect in your flat and it is not a gap in the model — it is deliberate, and the three rooms it applies to are also the three that move your score the least. One kitchen in the wrong corner costs more than all three of these rooms misplaced at once.

The three rows, in full

Fourteen room types across nine zones is 126 cells. Twenty of them are ideal (90 and above), 38 good (70–89), 33 acceptable (50–69) and 35 avoid (below 50). Eleven of the fourteen room types own at least one of those twenty ideal cells. These three own none:

Across those three rows — 27 cells — there are 14 good cells, 8 acceptable, 5 avoid and zero ideal. The ceiling is 5 or 6 points below the ideal band, not thirty. A guest bedroom in the north-west is one of the better placements in the whole table; it just does not get the top word for it.

What the model does when nothing clears 90

Worth knowing, because it is why your result still names a direction for these rooms. The function that reports a room's ideal directions collects every cell at 90 or above. For eleven room types it finds one, two or three. For these three it finds none — and rather than return an empty list, it falls through to the single highest cell in the row. So your report says north-west for a second bedroom, west for dining and south-east for a utility area, exactly as it would for any other room. What it is handing you is the best available cell, not a cell the code considers perfect, and for these three rooms those are different things.

This matters when you compare your result against the advice pages. The genre agrees with our directions almost exactly — the north-west for a guest bedroom is near-unanimous, and west is the most common recommendation for a dining room. Utility areas get written about hardly at all. What none of those pages can tell you, because none of them publishes a score, is that the direction they are recommending is a good cell and there is nothing better behind it. A reader who reaches good on these rooms and keeps hunting for ideal is hunting for something that does not exist.

Why that is fine: these are the three cheapest rooms you own

The score is a weighted average, and these three carry the lightest weights in it. A second bedroom is 0.07, a dining area 0.04, a utility area 0.02 — 0.13 between all three, which is exactly what one master bedroom carries on its own, and less than a main entrance (0.18) or a kitchen (0.16).

Put numbers on a plan and it stops being abstract. Take a fully labelled nine-space flat with every room in the best cell its own row allows: main door north-east (100), kitchen south-east (100), master bedroom south-west (100), toilet north-west (90), pooja east (90), living room north (90), second bedroom north-west (84), dining west (85), utility south-east (85). That plan scores 94 — and the only reason it is not higher is these three rooms, each shaving a point off even at its own best. Ninety-four is close to the practical ceiling of a labelled plan.

Now move the three to their worst cells and leave everything else alone:

Three rooms in the worst positions the table offers cost six points. One kitchen in the north-east costs fifteen, and no amount of non-structural work brings it past 86. That is the whole argument: the model withholds perfection precisely where the decision does not matter much.

And they are the most repairable rooms in the table

Look at the "after remedies" column again. The all-three-at-worst row recovers to 95 — higher than the starting plan's own 94, and the reason is a quirk worth knowing: the model only applies a recovery fraction to cells scoring below 70, so the starting plan, where nothing is below 70, gets no recovery at all and its reachable figure is just its score. None of these three rooms is in the short list of types anchored to plumbing, flue or structure, so each one recovers 85% of its deficit, against 45% for a kitchen or a wet room and 50% for a staircase, main door or garage. A badly placed dining table or wash area is a furniture-and-colour problem. A badly placed kitchen is a plumbing problem.

The dining area deserves a line of its own: it is one of only two room types in the entire table whose nine cells all clear the avoid band (a study is the other). Its floor is the south-west at 55 — acceptable. There is nowhere in a flat you can put a dining table and have the model call it a bad placement. If that is the room you have been worrying about, stop.

What to do with this

Label every room honestly in your free Vastu check, including the small ones, and then read the three verdicts against the ceiling rather than against 100. If your second bedroom, dining area or utility corner comes back good, you are at the top of what those rooms can score and there is no move left to make. Spend the attention on the heavy rooms instead — the main door, the kitchen, the master bedroom and the wet rooms carry about two-thirds of the weight between them, and those are the rooms where ideal is both available and worth having. Our guide to Vastu for a flat walks the zones in that order, and the older post on which room should be the master bedroom covers the heaviest single decision on a plan you cannot change. If you are weighing a number rather than a room, what score is good enough to buy is the one to read next.