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, 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 the whole building's facing; the unit door is only a door position | Cast 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: the building, with your door as a door position
We cast the chart from the whole building's facing. Your unit's front door does not determine the chart — it determines which palace the door falls in, which is a different thing.
The reasoning is that Flying Stars reads how a dwelling takes in qi. A tower is one complete structure; its qi mouth is the building's frontage and main entrance. Your front door opens onto a corridor, and the corridor's qi arrived through the building's own mouth — so your door is an inner door, not this dwelling's intake.
The other school treats each unit as a small house in its own right and casts from the unit door. Practitioners do use it, particularly for square, self-contained units.
What the choice actually changes: our way, every unit on a floor gets the same chart, and what differs between neighbours is the door position and which palace each room falls in. The other way, two units facing opposite directions on the same floor get two completely different charts, and therefore completely different auspicious sectors. 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 door, which year, and whether the floor counts. Our answers are the building's facing, the later year, and no — all three printed in the report, so you can take them to any practitioner and compare.