Flying Stars (玄空飛星) took shape in an era of standalone houses: one household, one front door, one completion year. Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore do not look like that. You live on one floor of thirty, the tower has its own main entrance, your unit has its own front door and its own balcony, the building went up in 1998, and you took a wall out in 2019.
That leaves three questions somebody has to answer, and the classical texts do not answer them directly:
Schools disagree on all three, and there is no single answer everyone accepts. The real problem is not "who is right" — it is that most online chart tools never tell you which school they picked. You get a chart with no way to see the three decisions behind it, and therefore no way to compare it against an analysis that says something different.
Here are our choices, the reasoning, and what the other school says.
The short answer
| Question | What we do | The other school |
|---|---|---|
| Facing | Cast from your unit's light side (living-room balcony or largest window); the door only sets the door position and Eight Mansions | Cast from the whole building's facing; or from your own front door |
| Period | The later of completion year and major renovation — a structural renovation of your own unit counts | Only the building's completion year |
| Floor number | Not applied | 1/6 water, 2/7 fire, 3/8 wood, 4/9 metal, 5/10 earth |
Facing: your balcony and main windows — not the building, not your door
We cast the chart from your own unit's light side: the way your living-room balcony faces, or, with no balcony, the living room's largest window. The building's facing does not cast the chart, and neither does your front door — the door decides which palace it falls in (the door position) and, in Eight Mansions, whether it is a good or bad direction for each person in the household.
The reasoning is that Flying Stars reads where a dwelling actually takes in qi. In a modern tower, qi from the ground-floor entrance passes through a lobby, a lift and a corridor before it reaches your door; what enters your home directly, every day, is the light and air on the balcony and window side. That side is this unit's facing.
The exception is a unit with almost no outside windows — a studio with one small window, say. It has no usable light side and takes in nearly all its qi through the front door, so such a unit is charted from its own front door.
Two other approaches are common:
What the choice actually changes: our way, two units on the same floor — one with a south-facing balcony, one with a north-facing balcony — get two different charts. The building-facing way gives the whole tower one chart. That is not a small gap, which is exactly why it should be stated up front.
Period: the later of completion and renovation
The period decides which chart you are on — a Period 9 home (2024–2043) and a Period 8 home (2004–2023) with the same facing do not share a chart.
We take whichever is later: the tower's completion year, or the year of a major renovation. And a structural renovation of your own unit counts — removing partition walls, moving the front door, touching the roof or reworking the overall layout all mean the dwelling's body has been altered.
The reasoning is simple: what resets the period is whether the structure was altered, not who altered it. A unit that has been gutted has already had its qi turned over; casting it from a completion year twenty years earlier is pretending the work never happened.
The other school counts only the building's completion year: the dwelling is the tower, and an individual resident cannot alter it.
The most common mistake here is not picking the wrong school — it is entering the wrong number. "Year built" means the year the tower was completed, not the year you moved in and not the year you repainted. Get that field wrong and the chart is wrong from step one, while the report itself still looks perfectly normal. It is the easiest error to make and the hardest to notice.
What counts as a major renovation? Structure, roof, front-door orientation, or substantial wall removal. Paint, flooring, furniture and new appliances do not.
Floor number: we leave it out
You have probably seen it: floors 1 and 6 are water, 2 and 7 are fire, and so on. We do not apply it.
Not because it has no basis, but because schools disagree so widely on how much weight it carries. Some treat it as a minor footnote; others will call a home unsuitable if the floor's element clashes with your Kua number. The same twelfth-floor unit can draw anything from "irrelevant" to "don't move in", depending on who you ask.
Our rule is: if we are not confident, we don't say it. The most valuable thing in a report is that you can trust it, and trading that for a few professional-sounding sentences built on a rule practitioners still argue about is a bad deal.
So the floor number is a deliberate blank in our analysis — a choice, not an oversight.
What if your practitioner uses the other school?
Then you will get a disagreement, and it will be a locatable one.
That is exactly why all three choices are stated in every report: near the facing and period sections, a sentence or two in plain language says which school the reading follows. When you hold it up against another analysis, you can see precisely where the two of you diverged — facing, or period — instead of staring at two contradictory conclusions with no way to tell them apart.
An analysis that hides its own assumptions is one you cannot check. That matters more than the conclusion itself.
In one line
An apartment raises three questions the classics never settled: which side, which year, and whether the floor counts. Our answers are your balcony and light side, the later year, and no — all three printed in the report, so you can take them to any practitioner and compare.