Ask Faisal Hissam from Zeen Design what shapes a good home, and the answer is grounded in the practical. “I always think about how it is going to be built, not just how it is going to look,” he says. Across sixteen years in building design, eight of them on the Sunshine Coast and earlier experience gained working on large-scale projects in Pakistan, Faisal has worked across residential, industrial, multi-residential, commercial and fit-out projects. High-end residential, though, is where the practice has found its specialty: coastal homes, custom builds and multi-residential design, delivered across South East Queensland and, more recently, Victoria.
ZEEN DESIGN’S LESS-IS-MORE PHILOSOPHY
Zeen Design is built around a single accountable point of contact and fixed-fee pricing, giving clients cost certainty and one person to call from the first sketch to the final inspection. But the philosophy runs deeper than process. For Faisal, restraint is the point.
“We actually believe less is more. The more practical the layout is, the better it is,” he says. Large, generous spaces have their place, but only when they earn it. “While I appreciate a living space being larger, it has to have some sense to it.” That discipline is about longevity and cost, but never at the expense of impact. “It doesn’t mean it has to be very simple. It has to have that wow factor, and that’s something we try to achieve through the material selection, the colours, and how we integrate the materials so they enhance the whole space.”
The client’s brief drives every selection, and there is room for expression within the restraint. “A lot of my designs have interesting angles, and I like to play around with them,” Faisal says. “But the endgame is always: how do we achieve it?”
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SOLAR PASSIVE DESIGN: HOW ZEEN DESIGN BUILDS FOR CLIMATE
That practicality extends to how a Zeen Design home meets its site. Solar passive design sits at the centre of the practice’s thinking, orienting a building to its climate, sun path and prevailing breezes, and selecting materials and insulation that keep interiors comfortable year-round while reducing running costs. It is an approach built to keep a home flexible over time, adapting as a client’s needs evolve.
That considered, site-responsive thinking has drawn recognition, with Zeen Design‘s Potassium Street mass timber warehouse honoured at the 2024 Regional and State Design Awards for Building Design Queensland, and The Linear Precinct at the 2025 Regional Design Awards. Yet for all the accolades, Faisal’s ambition remains simple: to keep designing homes that are practical at heart, considered in their making, and quietly beautiful to live in.
