Every home has one. The room you quietly stop using between two and five in the afternoon: too bright to work in, too warm to rest in, the one where the curtains stay drawn right through summer.
It is rarely bad luck. It is orientation. A room on the south-west of a building takes the full weight of the afternoon sun, low in the sky and hard to shade. The walls there absorb heat for hours and release it slowly into the night.
What the old texts already knew
Traditional Indian planning placed the heaviest, least-occupied functions (storage, stairs, thick masonry) toward the south and west. Not as ritual, but as a buffer. Those rooms took the heat so the lived-in rooms did not.
Bedrooms and daytime rooms were drawn toward the north and east, where morning light is gentle and the afternoon sun never arrives with the same force.
A plan that ignores the sun does not remove the sun. It only moves the discomfort somewhere you will feel it later.
What you can do
You cannot rotate a built house. But you can read it. Knowing which wall carries the afternoon load tells you where shading, ventilation and planting will genuinely change how a room feels, and where they would simply be decoration.