Kitchen Check

Why the Kitchen Zone Scores Lowest Here

The south-east is the traditional placement, being the fire zone, with the north-west as the recognised alternative. A north-east kitchen is the one most consistently cautioned against.

But a kitchen is fixed by gas lines, plumbing, drainage and the structure of the building. Relocating one in a flat is almost never practical and rarely proportionate even in a house. It scores three of fourteen points here for exactly that reason.

The remaining eleven points go to things you can actually change, which is what makes the score useful rather than just informative.

Ventilation and Cleanliness — Six Points

These two together carry more weight than the zone and the cooking direction combined.

Ventilation is the finding most often mistaken for a directional problem. Households reporting that their kitchen feels heavy, oppressive or draining almost always have heat and cooking smells lingering in the room, and that is a real problem in any framework. An exhaust that works, a window that opens, a chimney that is actually cleaned — these change how a kitchen feels more than any correction.

Clearing the platform at the end of each day is a small discipline with an outsized effect. Walking into a clean kitchen in the morning is a different experience from walking into last night's dishes, and the tradition treats cleanliness in this zone as seriously as it treats direction.

Fire and Water

The stove and the sink sitting directly adjacent is what the tradition asks to avoid — fire and water in immediate contact. It carries two points here.

In a fitted modular kitchen this is often already handled by the layout. Where it is not, even a modest separation helps, and moving a portable stove a foot along the platform is sometimes all that is available. It is a small correction and worth making where it is possible.

Cooking Direction

East is the traditional preference while cooking, with north as the accepted alternative.

The honest note here: in a fitted kitchen the platform position fixes which way you face, and there is usually nothing to be done about it. Where the kitchen allows a choice — a portable stove, an island, a platform with more than one usable side — facing east is worth doing. Where it does not, it is not worth worrying about, and it carries only three of fourteen points for that reason.

A North-East Kitchen

This is the placement most people arrive worried about, and it deserves a direct answer.

Relocating is almost never practical. What carries the weight instead: correctional colour in the zone, keeping the space scrupulously clean, ensuring genuinely good ventilation, and separating the stove from water sources where the platform allows.

A household doing those four things in a north-east kitchen is in a better position than one with a perfectly placed kitchen that is dim, unventilated and never cleared. That is not a consolation — it is how the tradition actually weighs cleanliness and light against placement.

What Else Belongs in a Kitchen Assessment

Beyond what this tool covers: where heavy grain and provision storage sits (south and west), where the refrigerator goes (generally south-west or south-east rather than north-east), whether there is damp or leakage in the zone, and whether the kitchen shares a wall with a bathroom.

Those need a floor plan and a compass reading to assess properly, which is where a consultation adds something a questionnaire cannot.