Kitchen Vastu: direction, stove, sink and layout

Which direction should a kitchen face?

The south-east (Agni) is the first choice. It is the zone of fire, it takes morning sun that dries and airs the room, and it keeps the heat of cooking on the side of the house that is already hot — away from the living room and the bedrooms.

The north-west (Vayavya) is the accepted second choice, and is common in flats where the south-east is taken by a bedroom.

Avoid the north-east and the south-west. The north-east is the water and pooja zone, and fire there is considered a direct conflict; the south-west should carry the heaviest, most static use, which a kitchen is not.

Inside the kitchen

Keep the stove and the sink apart

If you take one thing from this page, take this: a stove immediately beside a sink is the most commonly flagged kitchen Vastu problem, and it is also a practical annoyance — splashes, and nowhere to set a hot pan down. Two feet of counter between them fixes both. An L-shaped counter with the stove on the short arm and the sink at the far end of the long arm is the standard solution.

If your kitchen is in the wrong zone

• You cannot always move a kitchen. What you can move is the stove — putting the cooking platform in the south-east corner of a kitchen that is itself elsewhere is the usual correction.
• Make sure you face east or, failing that, north while cooking.
• Keep the kitchen well lit and ventilated, with no toilet sharing a wall with it and no pooja unit inside it.
• Do not put the kitchen directly under or above a toilet on another floor.

Check your own plan against this

Open the plan editor, set your plot size and the facing, and the Vastu checker marks each zone on the sheet — green where the room matches the convention, amber where it is borderline, red where it is wrong — with the reason written out next to it. Move the wall, and the check updates as you drag.

A note on how to use this

Vastu Shastra is a traditional Indian system of directional planning, not a building code. Plenty of its rules line up neatly with good tropical design — a south-east kitchen gets morning sun and keeps afternoon heat away from the living room, a north-east opening brings in soft light, heavy mass on the south-west shades the house through the hottest hours. Others are purely traditional.

Treat the checker in the editor the same way a structural engineer treats a rule of thumb: it tells you what the convention says, quickly, so you can decide what to follow and what to trade away. It will never stop you drawing the plan you want.