Pooja room Vastu: direction and placement

Direction and facing

• Put the pooja room or unit in the north-east (Ishanya) of the house.
• Place the idols on the east or north wall of that space, so you face east or north while praying.
• Second choice, if the north-east is genuinely unavailable: the east or the north.
• Ground floor rather than an upper floor, where there is a choice.

What must not be next to it

• Not under a staircase.
• Not sharing a wall with a toilet, and not directly above or below one.
• Not inside a bedroom if it can be avoided; if it must be, keep it in the north-east corner of the room, with a curtain or shutter that closes it at night.
• Not in the kitchen, and not in a basement.
• Not facing the main door directly, and idols should not face each other.

Fitting one into a small plan

On a 600 to 1000 sq ft plan you will not find a separate room for pooja, and you do not need one. A 3 × 3 ft niche in the north-east corner of the hall, with a raised platform and a shutter, satisfies every rule above. On plots of 1500 sq ft and more, a 4 × 5 or 5 × 6 ft room with a door and a threshold is the usual arrangement.

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.