Bed placement
Three conditions, one plan. Where the bed goes is the oldest question in domestic feng shui and the one with the clearest answer, a wall behind the head, the door in view, the body out of the door’s line. Why each condition is there, what to give up first when a room cannot give all three, the four rooms that are not the drawing, the walls that are quiet and the walls that are not, and what the sleep research adds.
Oriented N 351°
Water
Lie down. Can you see the door? Is there a wall behind your head? Are your feet pointing anywhere other than straight at the door? If the answer to all three is yes, the bed is in the command position and this guide has nothing to tell you. If not, it has one drawing, an order in which to give things up, four rooms that are not the drawing, and a few things the tradition did not know about walls.
The three conditions
A solid wall behind the head. Not a window, not a half-height partition, not a wardrobe’s side, not the middle of the room. The tradition’s image is the hill behind a good site, the black tortoise of the four animals; the practical version is a headboard against a wall that does not move, let in draughts, or transmit the neighbours. A headboard of its own, solid and tall enough to lean on, is the tortoise a bed carries with it, and the manuals treat a bed without one as a bed that is only half backed.
The door in view. From the pillow, without craning, you should be able to see the door and anyone coming through it. This is the condition the tradition weights most heavily and the one with the most plausible psychological basis: a body that can see the way in relaxes, and a body that cannot listens. Wong puts it first among the three; Rossbach draws it as the arrangement in which the sleeper is “in command” of the room, which is where the site’s name for the position comes from.
Out of the door’s line. The bed should not be aligned with the door so that a line drawn through the doorway runs along the bed. The tradition names the arrangement with the feet pointing at the door the coffin position, after the way a body was carried out of a Chinese house feet first, and reads the head in the door line as almost as bad. The diagonal position, across the room from the door, is the classical answer and usually the only one that satisfies all three conditions at once.
The exceptions, in order
Most bedrooms are too small for the perfect diagonal, and every guide that pretends otherwise has not seen a city flat. The tradition has an order for what to give up, and it is the same order the command position page draws for a desk and a seat.
- Give up the diagonal before the wall. A bed in line with the door but with a solid wall behind the head is better than a bed at a perfect angle with its head under a window. The line is a discomfort; the window is a draught, a light and a noise.
- Give up the view before the wall. If the only solid wall means the door is behind you, take the wall and put a mirror where it shows you the door without reflecting the bed: on a side wall, angled, checked from the pillow. The mirror guide draws the check.
- Give up the window last. If the head must go under a window, make the window a wall: heavy curtains that close, a tall solid headboard that stands between the pillow and the glass, and a blind that shuts out the street lamp.
The four rooms in the drawing are the ones the list above is for. Door and window opposite each other leave a third wall, and the bed takes it, diagonal to the door and out of the window’s draught. A long narrow room takes the bed along its long wall with the head at the end away from the door and a chest at the foot to close the line. A bed that must go under the window is given a wall of its own, a tall solid headboard and curtains that close. A bedroom with an en-suite keeps the bed out of the bathroom door’s line, which in most plans means the wall the door is not on, and keeps that door shut at night.
Which wall is quiet
The tradition asks for a solid wall and does not say which. A modern bedroom has up to four kinds, and they are not equal. An internal wall, with another room of the same flat behind it, is the quietest and warmest, and the one the tradition would have chosen if it had known the others. A party wall, shared with a neighbour, is solid and may carry their television or their stairs; a bed with its head against a neighbour’s living room is backed by a loudspeaker. An outside wall is cold in winter, and a bed against it loses heat through the headboard side all night. A wall with the street beyond it is the noisiest, and the sleep research is unambiguous about the street.
The order, then, where a room offers a choice: the internal wall first, the party wall second if the neighbour is quiet, the outside wall third with a headboard and a rug behind it, and the street wall last, with everything the sleep guide has to give.
Above, beside, beneath
Beams and slopes. Nothing heavy over the bed. If a beam crosses it, move the bed; if it cannot move, turn the bed so the beam runs along it; if that fails, a canopy or a false ceiling. A sloping ceiling over the head of the bed is read the same way, and so is a heavy shelf, a boxed-in duct or a high cupboard over the pillow. The beams and corners guide draws the cases.
Between door and window. A bed placed in the straight line between a door and a window sits in a draught, in the tradition’s terms and in the literal one, since the two openings make the room a corridor. Break the line with the bed elsewhere, or with a curtain, a screen or a chest at the foot.
Doors that open onto the bed. A wardrobe or en-suite door that swings toward the sleeper is a small sha qi, an edge that arrives at the bed; rehang it, or keep it shut, or turn the bed so the door opens at its side rather than its head.
Beside. Sixty centimetres of floor on the side one gets out of, and a table within reach of a lying arm, with a lamp on it that a hand can find in the dark. The bed for two guide runs the arithmetic for both sides.
Under the bed. Nothing, or soft things. The manuals dislike storage under a bed on the principle that what is beneath the sleeper presses on the sleeper; the designer dislikes it because a mattress needs air beneath it and a floor needs cleaning. A mattress on the floor fails both, and the tradition’s objection to it is the same as the tenant’s in a damp flat. The bedroom page covers the rest.
The compass, briefly
Compass practitioners will add a further layer: that the head of the bed should point in one of the sleeper’s four favourable directions, derived in the Eight Mansions method from birth year and sex. The site describes the method on its own page and does not compute it. Where a favourable direction and the command position conflict, every practitioner the site has read takes the command position, and where the two agree the method has done its work: it has made the reader look at the room and choose.
Reading the bed
The tests, lying down:
- Behind the head. A solid wall and a headboard. Not a window, not a partition, not open floor.
- Which wall. Internal before party, party before outside, outside before street.
- The door. Visible from the pillow without craning.
- The line. The feet not pointing at the door; the bed not on the door’s axis; nothing between a door and a window.
- Overhead. No beam, slope, shelf or cupboard over the pillow.
- The other doors. Wardrobe and en-suite doors that open away from the bed, or stay shut.
- Beside. Sixty centimetres to get out; a lamp within reach.
- Beneath. Nothing, or soft things; the mattress off the floor.
- The mirror. Not reflecting the bed, from the pillow.
- The compass. Last, and only if the nine above survive it.