Room advice is where most people meet Vastu, and it is where the gap between the texts and the popular chart is widest. This section goes through the rooms of a home one at a time and says, for each, what we could find in a verse and what was added later.
The most surprising fact is how little the Brihat Samhita says. It names only four rooms and their directions: the gods’ room in the north-east, the kitchen in the south-east, the store in the south-west and the treasury and granary in the north-west. The rest of the familiar chart, with the master bedroom in the south-west, toilets in the north-west, stairs in the south and so on, is modern or later convention, and the texts we read do not contain it. That does not make the conventions wrong. It means they should be offered as conventions, and nobody needs to feel that a home has failed an ancient test because of them.
The entrance is the exception, because the classical table is detailed. It gives a result for each of 32 squares around the edge of the plot, and two English translations disagree about a few of them. The guide to the entrance sets out the whole table, and the free entrance checker turns a compass bearing into a pada.
The other guides follow the same pattern. They state the verse where there is one, describe the later rules, and then say what a person can reasonably do if their kitchen, bedroom or toilet is somewhere else, which in most flats it will be. Where a rule is really about ventilation, drainage or hygiene, we say so, because those matter far more than any compass direction.
Nothing in these pages predicts illness or loss from the position of a room, and none of them asks you to rebuild anything. If a result worries you, read remedies without demolition before you spend money.