The Ten Most-Discussed House Faults Need No Compass

On October 2 the Taiwanese data outlet DailyView published a ranking of the ten residential layout faults most argued about online, and udn.com and China Times carried it the same week. The order, by volume of discussion: the road clash, the straight-through hall, the stove seen from the door, the facing-door clash, the center-palace fault, the beam overhead, the toilet seen from the door, the toilet facing the bed, the wall blade, the stairs seen from the door. What makes the piece worth reading is not the order. It is that every single entry is stated twice — once as the traditional taboo, and once as a reason from building physics.

The method is declared, which is more than most such lists manage: a year of text from Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, news sites, forums and blogs, September 3, 2025, to September 2, 2026, run through Big Data Co.'s KEYPO engine. And the small print is unusually careful about what the number is:

“

The rank represents only the volume of online discussion. It does not represent whether internet users' opinions were positive or negative.

That sentence does more work than the ranking does. It says the list is a measure of how much a thing was talked about, not of how bad it is and not of whether anyone agreed. Read it as a ranking of severity and you have added a claim the data does not carry — the same move as reading "top auspicious day" off a calendar that computes the day but never ranks it.

All ten belong to one school, and it is not the one with the compass

Sort the ten by which system they come out of and they do not spread out. Every one is Form School, the branch that reads the physical shape of a place: where the road points, where the door opens, what the beam does over your head, which way the building next door turns its corner. Not one of them is Eight Mansions, and not one is Flying Stars.

That distinction is not academic, because the two kinds of question are answered by different things. A Form School question is settled by standing in the room: you can see whether the front door and the window fall on one line, whether the stove is visible from the threshold, whether a beam crosses the bed. A compass school question cannot be settled that way at all — it needs a bearing in degrees, or a birth date, or the year the building was finished. All ten of these need a tape measure, a floor plan and a look out of the window, and nothing else.

We should say what follows from that about this site. We publish four calculators, and between them they answer none of the ten. Eight Mansions gives you four favorable directions from a birth year; the two Flying Star tools give you a nine-palace chart from a facing and a build year. None of them has anything to say about whether your stove is visible from your front door. There is no Form School tool here, and the ten faults people actually argue about are the ten we compute nothing for. That is not a gap we are about to fill with arithmetic, because these are not arithmetic — but it is worth stating plainly rather than letting a reader assume a calculator covers the thing they came in worrying about.

The article keeps the name and replaces the reason

Go down the list and watch what each entry is justified by. The road clash, at number one, is a road aimed at your door; the reasons given are headlights into the window at night, traffic noise, dust, and vehicles that lose control. The toilet seen from the door and the toilet facing the bed: humidity, odor, and noise at night in the room you sleep in. The beam overhead: visual oppression, with the standard remedy named as a curved boxing-in of the beam. The wall blade is the neighboring building's right-angled corner turned toward your windows, and the reasons are glare, light and air.

Every one of those is a reason you could give to a building inspector. None of them requires anybody to accept that a road carries anything at it, or that a corner cuts. The tradition supplied the name and the modern paragraph supplies the mechanism, and if the mechanism is what is carrying the weight, then the sha, the harm each name announces, is functioning as a mnemonic rather than as an explanation.

We think that is worth saying without sneering at it. A mnemonic that packs "do not buy the apartment at the end of the T-junction" into a three-character Chinese name is a good piece of engineering, and it traveled — it got itself passed down through people who had no way to measure a particulate count and no standard to cite. A table of air-change rates would not have made that journey. What it cannot do is settle a case the physics does not already settle, and the honest version of most of this list is that the physics settles it.

"Hide the wind, gather the qi" is not a rebranding of ventilation

One entry does not reduce, and it is the one at number two. The straight-through hall is the front door and a window on a single line, and the article names the principle behind it correctly: traditional feng shui insists on "hiding the wind and gathering the qi" — gather the air, do not let it rush through. That is not the same claim as any modern ventilation guidance, dressed differently. A ventilation standard wants air changes; cross-ventilation is the thing designers reach for, not the thing they avoid. Here the tradition and the physics are not overlapping, they are pulling in opposite directions, and pretending otherwise would be the easy move.

The most defensible reading is narrower than either. When engineers put a Beijing courtyard house through airflow simulation and field measurement — the study we wrote about last month — what the feng shui layout improved was the comfortable wind zone, which grew by 75.52%. Not still air, and not maximum flow: a band in the middle, bounded at the top by draft and at the bottom by stagnation. Read the principle as "avoid both extremes" and it becomes a comfort criterion, which is a claim that can be measured and in one climate has been. Read it as "qi leaves through the window" and there is nothing to measure.

Under that reading the straight-through hall is about a draft you feel on the sofa in February, which is a real complaint and a fixable one. It is not about anything leaving the apartment.

Rank the list by what you cannot change after you sign

If the ranking is a measure of discussion, then a buyer needs a different ordering, and it is easy to produce. Ask of each fault: after the contract is signed, is this mine to change?

Three of the ten are not. The road clash is the street — it was there before the building and it will outlast your mortgage. The wall blade is the corner of somebody else's building. The facing-door clash is the door of the apartment across the hall, which belongs to a neighbor and opens when they decide. The stairs seen from the door sit either side of that line depending on whether the staircase is inside your home or the building's.

Two are structure, so they are expensive rather than impossible: the center-palace fault is a wet room sitting at the plan's geometric core, which is the plan; the beam overhead is the structure itself, and the article's own remedy — rounding and boxing it — changes how it reads without moving it. The remainder are a partition, a door, a cooker hood or a different wall for the bed.

So the two lists barely resemble each other. The single most-discussed interior fault, the straight-through hall at number two, is also among the cheapest to address: a partition screening the entrance breaks the sightline outright, and because it stands in the path between the two openings it genuinely changes the airflow as well, by an amount that depends on how big those openings are. Meanwhile the wall blade, ninth by volume, is permanent.

Our honest read

DailyView did what it said it did, and said what it was doing. The datum worth keeping is not the rank order — it is that a 2026 property piece states every traditional taboo twice, and that the second statement, the one about dust and odor and glare, is the one carrying the argument. We think that is the right direction of travel, and it is worth being clear about what it costs the tradition: once the physical reason is the reason, each item is not being confirmed so much as retired, one at a time, into building physics. A rule that turns out to be about cooking smoke is a good rule about cooking smoke.

The exception is the one at number two, and it is the exception because it does not reduce. Hiding the wind and gathering the qi asks for something a ventilation standard does not ask for, so it is either wrong or it is a comfort criterion — and the one study anybody has pointed us at found a comfort band, not stillness. That is the shape of a claim worth keeping: narrow, measurable, and capable of being wrong.

As for the rest of it, the useful thing here is that you do not need us. Ten faults, no bearings, no birth dates, no build year — a floor plan, a satellite view and twenty minutes in the rooms will settle every one of them. We would rather say that than sell a calculator for a question a tape measure answers.