Vastu for a West-Facing House: What the Direction Actually Costs

Short answer: a west-facing house is fine. In the placement table our check runs on, a main door in the west scores 70 out of 100, which the same code reads as good — the band that runs from 70 to 89. It is not the best door (north-east is 100, north 95, east 90), but it is the last cell in the good band, and everything below it drops straight to avoid. Put a number on what facing west costs you and it comes to roughly 6 points of your overall score versus a north-east door. A south-west door, by contrast, costs about 16. That is the whole of the west-facing problem, and it is smaller than the genre implies.

What "west facing" does and does not decide

A west-facing house means the main door faces west. It does not mean your rooms are in the west. Those are separate facts, and only the first one is set by the facing direction.

Our check reads your floor plan, has you confirm which way north points and what each room is, and then grades every room on the zone it actually lands in. The main entrance is one row of that assessment. The kitchen, the master bedroom, the toilets, the pooja room and the rest are each graded on their own zone, and their scores do not change one point because the front door happens to point west.

That matters because of how much of the verdict the front door carries. The entrance is the single heaviest room type in the table, at a weight of 0.18 — more than the kitchen (0.16) or the master bedroom (0.13). Normalised over the room set of a typical 2BHK — entrance, kitchen, master bedroom, second bedroom, living room, toilet, pooja — the entrance is about 22% of the whole verdict. So:

• Trading a north-east door (100) for a west one (70) is a 30-point deficit on 22% of the score: about 6.5 points off the total.
• Trading it for a south-west door (25) is a 75-point deficit: about 16 points.

Roughly four-fifths of your Vastu score is decided by where the rooms sit, not by which way the building looks.

The entrance row, in full

This is the complete set of values our check uses for a main door, ranked, with the verdict word the code attaches to each:

Door faces	Score	Verdict
North-East	100	Ideal
North	95	Ideal
East	90	Ideal
North-West	75	Good
West	70	Good
South-East	45	Avoid
South	40	Avoid
Centre	40	Avoid
South-West	25	Avoid

One thing is worth pointing out because nobody else publishes the row and so nobody else can see it: the entrance row has no "acceptable" cell at all. It steps from West at 70, the bottom of good, straight down to South-East at 45, the top of avoid. There is a 25-point gap in the middle with nothing in it.

West sits on the good side of that gap. That is the useful fact about a west-facing house, and it is the reason a west door and a south-west door should never be discussed as one thing — they are 45 points apart on the same row.

The west is the safest column in the table

Here is something that only shows up if you read the table down a column instead of across a row. These are all fourteen room types scored in the west:

Room in the west zone	Score	Verdict
Study	90	Ideal
Toilet / bath	85	Good
Dining	85	Good
Staircase	85	Good
Bedroom	82	Good
Master bedroom	80	Good
Store	75	Good
Main entrance	70	Good
Living room	70	Good
Utility	70	Good
Garage	70	Good
Balcony	60	Acceptable
Kitchen	55	Acceptable
Pooja	55	Acceptable

Nothing in that column falls below 50. Of the nine zones in our table, west is the only one with no avoid cell for any room type. The north-east — the zone everyone wants — contains a 15 for the kitchen and a 15 for the toilet. The centre contains a 10. The west contains no disasters at all. Its ceiling is lower than the north-east's, and so is its floor, and the floor is the part that costs a buyer money.

So if you are looking at a west-facing flat, the west half of it is not where your risk is. Your risk is wherever the kitchen and the toilets ended up.

What to check instead, in order

1. Confirm north before anything else. Everything above depends on the zone each room falls in, and the zones are 45° sectors measured from north. If north is wrong by 90°, every number changes. Our free online Vastu compass gives you a bearing and names the zone; a printed arrow on a brochure plan is not evidence.
2. Find the kitchen. South-east is 100, north-west 80. West is 55 — acceptable, no more. North-east is 15 and it is the one to walk away from.
3. Find the toilets. North-west is the only ideal cell on that row at 90; west is 85 and south 75. North-east is 15 again.
4. Then look at the door. If it is west, it is good and there is nothing to fix. Our scoring only applies remedy recovery to rooms scoring below 70, so a west entrance at exactly 70 is not treated as a deficit to be recovered — there is nothing there to recover.

What we do not model, and should say plainly

The classical rule for a west door is finer than "west". Traditional practice divides the wall into nine padas and prefers particular ones, and most of the pages ranking for this query will tell you which. Our table is an eight-zone model and does not compute padas. Where the opening sits along the wall matters to us only in that it decides which 45° zone the door lands in — a door at the far north end of a west wall can fall in the north-west sector (75) rather than the west one (70).

The same goes for the career and prosperity claims attached to this direction across the genre. Our check does not model them, does not score them, and this post is not evidence for or against them.

What it does model is the zone every room in your plan sits in, and that is about four-fifths of the answer. Upload your floor plan for a free Vastu check and the zones and score come back without a signup. If you want the mirror image of this post, what actually matters in a north-facing house runs the same arithmetic from the other end of the row.

A west-facing house is not the problem. Nine times out of ten, the kitchen is.