Rooms · Cook · 12 min read · Updated September 2026

The kitchen

Fire and Water in one room, a metre apart. The god who lived over the stove and the rules he left, the brick stove the manuals were written for and where its mouth faced, the cook’s position, the work triangle with its numbers, the four layouts, and what the air in a kitchen actually contains.

Oriented S 174°

Fire

Fig. 01 The kitchen is the house’s yang room, hot and bright. The tradition asks that its fire be visible, protected, and kept from its water.

In a house full of symbolic elements the kitchen is the room where the elements are real: an actual fire, actual water, actual metal and, in most kitchens, timber and stone. The tradition treats it as the house’s hearth and stomach, the source of its nourishment, and it worries about the stove the way it worries about the bed. It has a reason the manuals rarely give: for two thousand years a god lived over the stove, and most of the kitchen’s rules are his.

The god over the stove

Tradition · Zao Jun

The Kitchen God, Zao Jun, is the oldest domestic deity in China and the one every household had. His paper image was pasted on the wall above the stove, and from there he watched the family for a year; on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month he was sent to heaven to report, with offerings of sticky sweets to seal his lips or sweeten his account, the old image burned and a new one pasted at New Year. Chard’s study of the cult gives the scriptures that went with him, and they are lists of what not to do at the stove: not to step over it, not to chop on it, not to quarrel or weep or undress before it, not to burn rubbish in it, not to let it go cold. A stove clean, lit and respected is the cult’s rule before it is the manuals’, and the tradition’s insistence that a stove be used, and that a household which never cooks has no hearth, is the god’s empty seat.

The stove the rules were written for was a brick one, zao, built against a wall with a firebox on one side and one or two round openings on top in which the woks sat. The cook stood at the woks facing the wall; the fire was fed from the firebox mouth, often round the side or from a lean-to behind, by a second person or a child; and the flue, in the north, ran under the brick bed and warmed it. The stove was the one fixed thing in the house that had a direction of its own, the way its mouth faced, and the Compass schools read that direction as they read the door’s.

School · The stove’s mouth

Eight Mansions gives the stove a rule of its own: it should sit in one of the householder’s four bad sectors and its mouth should face one of the four good, so that the fire burns up what is harmful and draws in what is not; the school’s phrase is that the stove presses on the bad and faces the good. The mouth is the firebox opening of a brick stove. On a hob, which has no firebox, practitioners disagree about what the mouth is, the side the cook stands on, the side the controls are on or the side the gas comes in, and the disagreement is a fair measure of how far the rule can be carried. The Eight Mansions page gives the good and bad sectors by birth year; the drawing below shows the rule for one case; and a reader who cannot settle what a hob’s mouth is should take the cook’s facing and leave the rest to the school.

The stove

The stove is the kitchen’s bed: the fixed point around which everything is read. The tradition asks three things of it. That the cook should not have their back to the kitchen door while at it; that it should not sit directly opposite the sink or the refrigerator, or immediately beside them; and that it should be kept clean, working and used.

Plan 01 The kitchen: Fire and Water a metre apart with Wood between, and the cook facing the room The sink sits under the window on the left wall; the ghosted stove on the top counter is the ordinary arrangement, with the cook’s back to the door. The solid stove is on an island, so that the cook faces the room and sees the door, and a run of wooden worktop lies between the sink and any stove. The fridge, Water in the tradition’s reading, keeps its distance from the fire as well.

The cook’s position

A stove against a wall with the door behind the cook is the ordinary arrangement and the one the tradition likes least, for the reason it gives everywhere: a person with their back to the entrance is unsupported, and a person with a pan in their hand is the last person in the house who should be startled. The classical remedies are a stove on an island or a peninsula, so that the cook faces the room and sees the door, or, where the wall stove cannot move, a reflective surface, a small mirror, a polished tile, the splashback itself, that lets the cook see who is coming in. The command position page draws the cook beside the bed, the desk and the main seat, because it is the same rule, and gives the field of view that makes a door behind the cook a door the cook cannot see.

Fire and Water, a metre apart

The tradition’s other kitchen rules are the same rule at different points in the room. The fridge, Water in the manuals’ reading, keeps its distance from the stove as the sink does. The stove should not stand under a window, where the tradition reads the fire as unsupported and the cook reads a draught on the flame. The stove should not sit in the line of the kitchen door, so that the first thing seen on entering is the fire; and the kitchen, if the plan allows, should not be the first room seen from the front door, because the house then reads as a canteen. The dishwasher and the washing machine, which the manuals did not know, are Water too, and go with the sink rather than beside the fire.

The work triangle, with its numbers

Fig. 02 A: the work triangle, with its numbers. The stove, the sink and the refrigerator make a triangle whose legs, by the kitchen planners’ rule, are each between a metre twenty and two metres seventy, and together between four and eight metres; here, on an L-shaped kitchen of three metres twenty by three, one metre seventy, one metre twenty and two metres seventy, five and a half in all. No route through the kitchen crosses it, and the tinted corner of worktop between the sink and the stove is the planners’ landing space and the tradition’s Wood between Water, the sink and the fridge, and Fire, the stove. B: the stove’s mouth, in the Eight Mansions reading. The stove sits in one of the householder’s four bad sectors, hatched, and its mouth, the side the fire is fed from, faces one of the four good ones, drawn for a person of the East group, whose good directions are east, south-east, south and north: the stove sits in the north-west and faces east. The school’s phrase is that the stove presses on the bad and faces the good. The triangle’s numbers are the National Kitchen and Bath Association’s, which descend from the Illinois studies of the 1940s; the legs in the drawing are measured from the plan. The stove’s mouth is the firebox opening of a brick stove; on a hob with no firebox the practitioners disagree about what the mouth is, the side the cook stands on or the side the controls are on, and a reader who cannot settle it should take the cook’s facing and leave the rest to the school.

The kitchen planners have a rule the tradition would recognise, and it has numbers. The work triangle, stove, sink and refrigerator, was worked out in the Illinois housing studies of the 1940s and is now the kitchen and bath association’s first guideline: each leg between a metre twenty and two metres seventy, the three together between four and eight metres, no traffic route crossing the triangle, and a landing space of worktop on either side of the hob and the sink. The tradition’s instinct to keep the stove and the sink apart, to put Wood between them and to keep the route out of the cook’s way is the same instinct in different clothes, and a kitchen planned on the triangle has satisfied the controlling cycle without hearing of it. The drawing gives one L-shaped kitchen with its legs measured, and beside it the Eight Mansions stove for a person of the East group, sitting in the north-west and facing east.

Four layouts

Fig. 03 Four kitchens, drawn in plan with the door at the bottom of each. A: a galley, with stove and sink on the same run and a worktop between, and the other run at the cook’s back. B: an L, with the stove on the long leg and the sink round the corner. C: a U, with the stove at the base, the sink and fridge on the arms, and the cook facing the room. D: an island hob, the one arrangement that gives the cook the door in view; the manuals accept it when the island is solid to the floor and the hob has counter on every side. S is the stove, W the sink, F the fridge. In every layout Fire and Water are a worktop apart and not face to face across an aisle, and the cook at the stove has something solid behind. The work triangle, sink to stove to fridge, is drawn where it closes.

The rules survive every layout, and each layout puts the stove somewhere different. In a galley the two runs face each other, and the tradition wants the stove and the sink on the same run with a worktop between rather than facing across the aisle; the cook at the stove then has the other run behind, which is a wall by another name. In an L the stove takes the long leg and the sink the short one, so the two are at right angles with a corner of worktop between. In a U the stove sits at the base and the sink and fridge on the arms, which is the work triangle with Fire at its apex and Water to one side, and the cook facing the room. A hob on an island is the one arrangement that gives the cook the door in view without a mirror, and the one the manuals accept only when the island is solid to the floor and the hob has counter on every side.

Where the kitchen sits

Compass practice has opinions about where in the plan a kitchen should be, and they conflict from school to school; the site does not adjudicate. Two points survive translation. The kitchen should not sit at the centre of the plan, the Earth position, which the tradition wants open and still rather than hot and busy; and it should have a window, because the tradition wants the room’s air moving and its fire clean, and a kitchen without one is a kitchen that keeps its smoke.

Evidence · Air

There is no evidence bearing on the position of a stove relative to a sink beyond the ergonomics of the work triangle. There is good evidence that ventilation matters. Lebel and colleagues measured gas hobs in fifty-three homes and found that a single burner in a small kitchen without an extractor pushed nitrogen dioxide past the outdoor air guideline within a few minutes, and that the hobs leaked methane even when off; the World Health Organization’s dampness guideline finds mould and its respiratory effects in kitchens and bathrooms that are not ventilated; and Allen and colleagues found cognitive scores rising sharply with better ventilation in a controlled office. An extractor that vents outside, and a window that opens, are the two most useful things in the room, and the tradition, which wants the kitchen’s air moving and its fire clean, would not disagree.

Yang, and kept so

The kitchen is the house’s most yang room and the tradition wants it kept that way: bright, warm, in use. The kitchen it dislikes is the dark one, the cold one, the one where the stove has become a shelf for the post. A clean stove with all its burners working is the tradition’s most repeated kitchen instruction, and it is not a metaphor: it is the god’s seat kept. The colour guide adds the one rule of decoration the manuals give for this room: Earth and Metal rather than more Fire, because the stove has supplied the Fire already.

In order

Stove first: clean, working, and placed so that the cook can see the door, on an island if the room is being planned and with a reflective splashback if it is not. Then the distances: sink and fridge apart from the fire, wood between, and the triangle’s legs within their numbers. Then the sightlines: the stove out of the door’s line, the kitchen not the first room seen. Then the air: an extractor that vents outside, a window that opens. The dining room page takes over where the food leaves the stove.