Designing for Vastu without giving up modern interiors

A large share of our clients want their home to follow Vastu, and almost none of them want it to look like a compromise. In practice the two are far less opposed than people expect.

The ones worth planning around

• Kitchen in the south-east, with the cook facing east. This is usually fixed by the builder's plumbing anyway.
• Master bedroom in the south-west, bed head to the south.
• Pooja space in the north-east, never sharing a wall with a bathroom.
• Heavy storage along south and west walls; keep the north-east lighter and more open.

Where you have room to move

Mirror placement, colour prescriptions and entrance direction are where the strictest readings cause the most design pain — and where interpretations vary most between practitioners. If your flat's entrance faces a direction you would rather it did not, the usual remedies are a threshold treatment and a foyer partition, both of which are good design decisions independently.