Whether I am helping someone with house hunting or doing a full evaluation on a property someone currently lives or works in, I start out with a few essentials in the analysis.  With my background in Flying Star Feng Shui, knowing the precise compass orientation of a house or building is critical.

Energy inside a structure is established and confined, once the ceiling and roof go on, so the year of construction must be factored in.  As well, the compass reading is the “space” part in this Space-Time calculation.  The compass reading changes slowly over time and it is the reading at the time it was built which matters.  That is when the structure “plugged” into the Earth. A Magnetic declination will move easterly or westerly in different parts of the world and we subtract or add those declination changes from Geographic or True North.

Sometimes the declination change in an area is particularly relevant and I have noticed that in some areas of Los Angeles County, my original stomping ground for practicing feng shui professionally.  While there is talk of pole shift taking place in our lifetime, it should be noted that the magnetic declination movement is related, even though a declination does not shift at the same rate or the same direction all over the globe. While skimming some articles about the use of the compass, I saw one article which stated that a compass is rendered useless less than 300 miles from the North pole.  And one must be careful with any readings done around magnetized rocks. Compasses are rather delicate instruments.

The point here is to let other feng shui practitioners and students know that this is something to pay attention to if you want to get an accurate reading.  I discuss this with clients on a regular basis, partly to educate and partly for liability’s sake.  I have to assume that sometimes a client gets a second or third opinion and I want them to be aware that I know what I’m doing.

When I first get a compass reading, either done in person or remotely, it may appear that a structure has a border-line compass reading, an Out of Trigram situation. These Out-of-Trigram charts are bad news.   But is it really that chart type?  I will immediately go the declination calculator and see how much the compass reading has changed since the place I am reviewing was built.

Fortunately, the declination calculator on the noaa.gov website goes back several hundred years. Sometimes, what appears to be a problem house NOW, may not be bad when I refer to its original compass orientation.

In another instance, I may do a compass reading for an older structure and see that it faces one of the defined 24 different directions, but I still check to see what it was when built. That occasionally reveals an Out of Trigram house or building when built long ago.

In the city of Beverly Hills, there is a commercial area called the Golden Triangle. Streets in this area are aligned NE to SW and NW to SE.  The exact degrees, going back to my first readings there in the 1990’s, were in the first sector range, such as NE-1 @ 34 degrees or 124 degrees (SE-1) for the buildings facing southeast.  In the last thirty years, the declination has moved westerly by 3 degrees. If you stand on Rodeo or Beverly Drive facing northeast, you will get a reading of 37 degrees as of 2025, which is right on the border between NE-1 and NE-2.  Because of this, a new and inexperienced feng shui practitioner might read the older buildings incorrectly.

And most of the buildings are older.  However, if a new building were to be placed on one of those streets in the Triangle, parallel to the existing streets, an Out of Trigram Building would be built and that sucks, to use an ancient Chinese phrase.

There are other areas of the greater Los Angeles area which are also “on the cusp” of two different directional zones, such as in downtown L.A., West L.A., Venice and parts of Santa Monica.   By just a few degrees, some of these homes and buildings have always been Out of Trigram/Borderline Readings, while some appear so, only now that the declination has moved in the last thirty years.

There may be a record amount of re-building in the aftermath of the Altadena Eaton Canyon fires and the Pacific Palisades/Malibu fires.  One neighborhood in the Palisades, where several of my clients once were, has streets aligned in such a way that the NEW homes built there will end up having borderline compass readings, when they did not at the time they were built, anywhere from the 1930’s through the early 2000’s.   Both the Palisades and the Altadena areas have a lot of hilly areas and meandering streets, so I am not referring to these entire burn areas as potentially becoming bad feng shui homes when rebuilt.

There are just some sections which will be Out of Trigram, and I can see it clearly from remote aerial photos, if the homes are rebuilt facing the exact same direction as the previous one on the lot.  Most people will not have a choice to orient their new home at a slight angle to correct this.   Lots can be narrow and with other building requirements and set-back codes, it will be impossible to prevent whole neighborhoods from this unfortunate circumstance.

If you are a feng shui practitioner reading this and have never checked to see if there was a magnetic declination change for any of the properties you have evaluated, feel free to contact me so I can help you learn about this important step in your flying star chart analysis.

Author: Kartar Diamond

Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®

From the Feng Shui Architecture and Design Blog Series