The first thing out of people’s mouths is almost never money. It’s: I’m not sleeping.
Sometimes it arrives lightly, as though it were only clearing the way for the real question. I stop there anyway, because the bedroom is the easiest room in the house to check and the easiest to change. Any other room you can walk out of when it sits wrong. The bedroom you lie in for eight hours with your eyes shut.
Before anything else, two layers need separating. If you ask me which direction the head of the bed should point, that is the compass school, and answering it properly means casting a chart and knowing who sleeps there. This article is the other layer, the one about landform and shape, which in a bedroom means whatever you can see and put your hand on. No compass required. Stand in the doorway and you can check most of it yourself.
A solid wall behind your head
The old phrase for the fault is 背后无靠, no support behind. A plainer thing than it sounds.
Hearing does not switch off when you sleep, and that part is established. If the direction your skull is pointing is open, a walkway, the opening to another room, some part of the body probably keeps a thread of attention on it all night. You will not notice this happening. That second half is my own account of it, I have never seen a decent experiment on it, and I use it as a working assumption rather than a finding. A solid wall closes the direction off.
The wall also handles temperature and sound, which a hollow stud partition, a glass panel or the back of a bookcase does not.
Worth checking what is on the far side. Sydney terraces and older walk-up apartments frequently put the master bedroom headboard against the neighbour’s living room, which means their television is on the far face of the same brickwork your ear is resting against. When that happens I move the bed to a different wall even if it ends up at an awkward angle and eats the floor space.
The window over the headboard
This is the one I talk about most in Australia, because of the housing stock.
Sydney is full of seventies and eighties brick homes where the master bedroom window is low, wide, aluminium-framed and single-glazed, with not much insulation in the wall under it, if any. In July, put your palm flat on that wall at two in the morning. It is barely warmer than the air outside. People sleeping with the back of the head against that wall tell me they wake up with a stiff neck and blame the pillow.
Summer is the opposite problem. Sunrise here is before six in December, and an east-facing bedroom is fully lit long before anyone wants to be awake. Aluminium frames leak light down both edges no matter what curtain you hang, and if the headboard sits under the window the light arrives from above and behind you.
Move the bed if the room allows it. If it doesn’t, run the curtain track up to the ceiling and past the reveal on both sides, and put something across the base of the window in winter. That is insulation advice rather than Feng Shui advice, but the outcome is the same and I write it in the report anyway.
The bed lined up with a door
A door is where noise, light and other people come from. In light sleep the body is disproportionately alert to it, because it is the only direction in the house that anything alive comes in from.
Yang-dwelling practice calls this 门冲床, a door clashing the bed, and treats it severely. In practice it is milder than that sounds. Keep the foot of the bed out of the straight line through the doorway. Half a metre off-axis is usually enough.
New Australian houses need this recalculated. Master bedrooms mostly come with an ensuite now, so the room has two doors rather than one, and they are often on opposite sides of the bed. Clients who have carefully sorted out the hallway door forget the ensuite. Somebody gets up at three in the morning, switches the ensuite light on, and it lands directly on their partner’s face. I have seen several couples arguing about sleep who had never once considered that the problem was a door.
Unrelated, but agents photographing a bedroom like to float the bed in the middle of the floor with nothing behind it, because the room reads bigger that way. That is staged for the camera, and nobody actually lives like that.
A beam across the ceiling above the bed
Less physics in this one, mostly sightline and headroom. The beam drops the ceiling locally and you lie down with a hard edge overhead in your field of view. Some people are completely unbothered. Others take months to settle and cannot say why.
Sydney throws these up constantly in rear extensions, converted garages and attic conversions, where the beam marking the old exterior wall is left exposed and someone has hung a ceiling fan or a row of downlights off it.
Two fixes. Shift the bed out from under the beam’s footprint, or bulkhead the ceiling so it reads flat. The second costs money and the first does not.
A mirror facing the bed
I can’t explain this one.
My account of it runs as far as waking at night, seeing movement in a mirror, getting a fright, and then it stops. Some practitioners say reflected light disturbs sleep. Others say it is purely suggestion. I have never found an explanation that holds up, and I have nothing resembling a controlled comparison. What I do have is a pattern in my own practice: of everything I put in a report, this is the item clients act on most often, and the one they most often come back and say helped. Whether that is the mirror or the fact that anyone rearranging their bedroom is usually fixing their life in three other ways at the same time, I cannot separate.
So I keep writing it down, and I keep saying I don’t know why. Turning a wardrobe door around costs nothing.
A bathroom next door, or directly above
Pipes.
The waste from an upstairs bathroom does not run down the outside of the house. A fair length of it runs through the ceiling you are sleeping under. You hear every flush at night, including the ones you believe you slept through. Sharing a wall is less bad, though the damp and the vibration from the exhaust fan both come through that wall.
This is the hardest one to fix, because fixing it means touching the plumbing. Most of the time the realistic options are to swap bedrooms or to put the bed in the corner furthest from that wall.
Six faults in one bedroom is rare. One or two is normal, and one or two is usually solved by moving a bed, which takes an afternoon and costs nothing. If the room genuinely has no wall worth putting a headboard against, take the quietest one and live with the rest.
One last thing that belongs here. If you have not slept properly for months, see a doctor first, and don’t expect moving a bed to stand in for that. What I deal with is the handful of things in the room you can measure and touch. Anything involving illness, law or money goes to a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant.