I have been reading my horoscope since I was in my teens, flipping to the back pages of every magazine or broadsheet I could get my hands on, looking for the horoscopes section, and reading the Pisces part with such intensity, as if I was absolutely certain the universe had something to say specifically to me. For most of those years, that was the extent of my relationship with astrology: a paragraph or two per month, a loose set of personality traits I half-agreed with, and a vague sense that I was dreamy and sensitive and creative, which—sure, fine, I can lean into it—was probably also true for about 40 percent of the people I knew, regardless of their sign.
What I didn’t realize, for most of those four decades, was that the horoscope I had been reading was, in the most literal sense, only the tip of the iceberg.
Now hear me out: I do identify as a Pisces. I love deeply, I feel things in my whole body, I am drawn to beauty and music and storytelling and all the things that Pisceans are drawn to. But there were always things about myself that the Pisces description couldn’t account for.
I am, for instance, an extroverted introvert, which sounds like a contradiction but is actually a very specific thing: I need people, I come alive in a room full of them, I will talk at length about myself and my life and my opinions without much prompting, and then I need several days of complete solitude to recover. I always assumed the talking-about-myself part was simple vanity. The Pisces profile didn’t fully explain it.
And then there was the ocean. Pisces is a water sign, fish and all, and you’d think I would feel most at home near the sea. I don’t. I like looking at the ocean from a safe distance, from a shore or a balcony or a restaurant with a good view. But if you put me in water, I’m happy to just float in my inflatable boat, thank you very much. I won’t snorkel, much less scuba dive. The vastness of deep water makes me vaguely anxious.
This seemed like a personal failing for a long time; where have you heard of a Pisces who was afraid of too much water?
It wasn’t until I got my full birth chart that I started to understand why.
What is a birth chart?
If the only sign you know is the one that corresponds to your birth month, then what I’m about to tell you might feel a little like finding out your favorite book has three (or 10) more chapters nobody told you about.
According to AstroStyle, a birth chart, also called a natal chart, is essentially a map of where all the planets were in the sky at the exact moment you were born, in the exact place you were born. Every planet was somewhere in its orbit at that moment, and each of those positions tells you something different about who you are and how you move through the world. The sign you’ve been reading your whole life, the one based on your birth month, that’s actually your Sun sign, and it’s just one of many.
To get your birth chart, you need three things:
- your date of birth
- your time of birth (as specific as you can get, ideally down to the minute)
- your place of birth
If you don’t know your exact birth time, check your birth certificate, or ask a parent if they remember. The time matters because some placements, particularly your Rising sign, shift every two hours or so, which means even twins born close together can have meaningfully different charts.
The easiest place to start is Cafe Astrology, which generates a free birth chart and actually explains what each placement means in plain language. If you want to go deeper over time, I personally subscribe to the CHANI app, which is what I use for ongoing reflection. But for a first chart, Cafe Astrology is where I’d send anyone.
Your Big Three, and what they each actually govern
When people talk about astrology beyond the basics, they usually start with what’s called the Big Three: your Sun sign, your Moon sign, and your Rising sign (also called your Ascendant). These three placements together give a much more complete, and much more accurate, picture of who you actually are.
Your Sun sign
Your Sun sign is the one you already know. Almanac.com describes it as the essence of your core identity, your ego, and your life force, the fundamental themes of who you are and what drives you. For me that’s Pisces, and yes: the creativity, the emotional depth, the tendency to dissolve into whatever I’m feeling, all of that is very much present.
Your Moon sign
Your Moon sign governs your emotional interior, how you instinctively process feelings, what makes you feel secure, and what unsettles you at a level you can’t always articulate. Mine is Virgo, and this explained so much. The obsessive editing. The compulsive need to research everything before forming an opinion. The fact that I feel most at peace when my environment is orderly, when things are in their right place and nothing is left unresolved. I used to think this was just anxiety. It is partly, but it’s also very Virgo Moon: the inner life of someone who is always taking inventory.
Your Rising/Ascendant sign
Your Rising sign, or Ascendant, is how you present yourself to the world, the first impression you give before anyone knows you well, the energy you walk into a room with. Mine is Leo, and yes, that explains the stage, and my complicated relationship with it. I have spent years insisting I’m not a performer, that I prefer writing to speaking, that I am fundamentally a behind-the-scenes person, while also somehow always ending up in the front of the room. Leo Rising will do that to you. It makes you care, often more than you’d like to admit, about being seen.
When I found out my Big Three, I remember feeling…gobsmacked. Now everything made sense! I am the Pisces Sun who softens everything. I am the Virgo Moon who edits obsessively. I am the Leo Rising who walks into a room and can’t help wanting to hold it. It didn’t just explain the contradictions I’d always felt; it made them make sense as a system, as a person who was never just one thing. Our birth charts show exactly how layered and how individually unique we are.
And it made me feel less of a failure when it came to the ocean. Of course, I prefer the shore; the Virgo in me needs to be able to see the edges of things!
And then there's the Venus sign
More recently, I learned that the Big Three signs aren’t the end of it. Your birth chart has placements for every planet, and each one governs a different dimension of who you are.
As someone who works in the interior design field, I zeroed in on Venus, of course.
As astrologers have noted, Venus is the planet of beauty, aesthetics, and personal taste, the part of you that responds to loveliness, that knows what it wants from a space or an outfit or a relationship before your rational mind has had a chance to weigh in. It governs desire, harmony, and the particular kind of pleasure you get from things that are beautiful to you specifically.
My Venus is in Aries. And when I found that out, I posted a reel about it, because I had a lot of feelings about it that I needed to process out loud. You can watch it here. The short version is this: I had always felt a slight disconnect between my taste and the soft, flowing, watery aesthetic you might expect from a Pisces. I love warmth, but I don’t love excess. I love texture, but I want it to have an edge. I love a beautiful room, but only if it doesn’t make me feel like I can’t breathe in it. Venus in Aries, it turns out, craves spaces that feel alive rather than merely pretty, spaces with energy and contrast and a sense that something is happening in them. We’ll get into what that looks like in practice, with actual spaces and actual images, in a future Part 2 of this blog post series.
Why any of this matters for your home
As someone who has been doing interior design professionally for over a decade, and who has sat across from hundreds of clients trying to help them figure out what they actually want, there’s one thing I do want to highlight:
The single hardest part of that conversation, almost always, is not the budget or the logistics or even the timeline. It’s that most people genuinely do not know how to describe what they want.
They can point to images, they can say “I like this” and “not that,” but they struggle to articulate the underlying logic of their own preferences, which means that even after hours of mood-boarding and sourcing and presenting, there’s a chance the space still won’t feel quite right to them, because we were working from the outside in.
The questions I ask clients early in the process are usually some version of these:
- How do you want to use this room?
- How do you want to feel in it?
- What do you want the space to say to the people who walk into it?
- What textures, colors, or styles do you find yourself returning to, even when you can’t explain why?
Notice that we don’t begin by asking interior design questions like “What’s your favorite design style?” or “Who are your favorite designers?” Instead, we ask identity questions such as the ones above. And it turns out your birth chart has been answering them all along.
Your Sun sign speaks to the first one most directly. It is your core identity, the underlying current of who you are, and it shows up in how you want to live in a space rather than just how you want it to look.
Let’s use my chart as an example. A Pisces Sun like me tends to need a home that feels like a refuge from the world, somewhere soft enough to decompress in, somewhere that holds a little mystery. But a Sagittarius Sun like my husband needs room to move, both literally and metaphorically, spaces that don’t feel like they’re closing in. When a client tells me they want a space that “feels like me,” the Sun sign is often the first clue to what that actually means.
Your Moon sign answers the emotional questions. How do you want to feel in the space? What would make you feel safe, restored, and genuinely at home at the end of a hard day?
The Moon governs your instinctive, pre-rational responses, the ones that make you walk into a room and exhale, or walk in and feel subtly wrong without being able to say why. A Virgo Moon, like mine, tends to feel most at peace in spaces that are organized and considered, where everything has a place and there is no visual noise competing for attention. A Gemini Moon (again, my husband) needs stimulation, things to look at, things to pick up, a space that keeps the mind alive rather than quieting it. A Cancer Moon needs warmth and enclosure, a space that wraps around you rather than opens up and away.
Your Rising sign answers the question designers sometimes phrase as: What do you want this space to say? Because your Ascendant is about how you present yourself to the world, it naturally influences the rooms other people see first, the entrance, the living room, the spaces where you receive guests.
A Leo Rising like me wants those spaces to make an impression, not in a showy way necessarily, but in a way that feels considered and warm and just a little larger than life. A Capricorn Rising wants the space to communicate competence and taste without trying too hard. A Libra Rising wants everything to be in balance, symmetrical, harmonious, beautiful in a way that feels effortless.
And then Venus, the planet that governs beauty, aesthetics, and personal taste, answers the question most clients find hardest to answer out loud: What do you actually find beautiful? Not what you think you should find beautiful, not what is trending, not what your friend has in her apartment that you admired. What do you respond to instinctively, at a level below trend and opinion?
Venus in earth signs tends toward the sensory and the grounded, natural materials, textures you want to touch, colors pulled from the land. Venus in air signs reaches for the intellectual and the eclectic, spaces that surprise, art that makes you think, arrangements that feel curated rather than decorated. Venus in water signs wants to feel things deeply in a space, mood and atmosphere matter more than object or color. Venus in fire signs, like mine in Aries, wants energy and immediacy, contrast and aliveness, spaces that feel like something is happening in them even when nothing is.
None of this replaces a good brief, a site visit, or a designer who knows what they are doing. But it is a remarkable starting point, and more than that, it is a way of helping you trust your own instincts rather than second-guessing them every time a new trend comes along.
If your Venus is in Taurus and you keep being drawn to linen and stone and warm neutrals, don’t ignore it. If your Moon is in Scorpio and you want your bedroom to feel like a cave, lean into it.
Your chart has been telling you who you are all along.
A quick note on Western versus Vedic astrology
Everything I’ve shared in this post refers to Western astrology, which is the system most people in the Philippines and the West are familiar with, the one behind the horoscopes you grew up reading and the birth charts you’ll generate on Cafe Astrology.
Vedic astrology, also called Jyotish, is a completely different system with different philosophical roots, different calculation methods, and a different zodiac. As the Art of Living explains, Vedic astrology is based on the sidereal zodiac, which is aligned to the actual positions of stars in the sky, while Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which is aligned to the seasons. The practical difference is significant enough that your signs in one system may not match your signs in the other.
I know very little about Vedic astrology, and I don’t want to speak to it beyond acknowledging that it exists, that it’s rich and complex and deserves its own exploration, and that this series is not about it. (Go check out my friend, Didi Paterno, who gave me a very eye-opening reading earlier this year!)
How to get your birth chart right now
If you’ve gotten this far and you want to know your own placements, here’s what to do.
Pull up Cafe Astrology (this is not a sponsored post btw! I just like using their birth chart calculator) and enter your birth date, your birth time, and your place of birth. The site will generate your chart and give you a breakdown of each placement in language that’s actually readable, no prior astrology knowledge required. If you don’t know your birth time, try your best estimate, or check your birth certificate, but know that some placements (particularly your Rising sign) may be less accurate without it.
Once you have your Big Three, sit with them for a bit. Read about each one separately before you try to synthesize them. And if you want to come back and tell me your placements in the comments, I genuinely want to read them.
Part 2 is coming, and it’s going to be the visual deep-dive: my own chart as the case study, the spaces I keep returning to on Pinterest as the evidence, and me finally being able to explain why I am the way I am about interiors. Stay tuned.
All photos from the Gal at Home Design Studio library. In writing this article, we used AI assistance for clarity, accuracy, and to align with our editorial guidelines and our commitment to providing valuable home design insights. You can view our full AI Use disclosure here.