A Phila. touch in China project

When John Milner Architects finished designing and planning the elite village of Southern Hill 1910, with its Georgian-style brick homes, the neighborhood looked just like one in Society Hill or on the Main Line.

Except the million-dollar dwellings aren't here. They're in Dalian, in northeastern China.

Ground has not yet broken on the next phase, but Milner's Chinese client, Dalian Common Property Development, wants to build 200 houses evoking 18th-century Philadelphia in downtown Dalian. About 65 of them, of 3,500 to 7,500 square feet, have sold for $1 million to $4 million, said Enyong Tang, director of operations for the project in China.

Milner, whose Chadds Ford firm has among its focuses classic American building design and preservation, has been retained for the second phase of the residential and office-space community, which encompasses several blocks in Dalian, a coastal city rapidly becoming a major IT and software center.

Groundbreaking is contingent on property acquisition; Milner said recently that he was unsure when that would happen.

After the initial phone call from the developer in 2009, Milner said, he scrambled. His client wanted to visit first, so Milner organized two weeks' worth of bus trips to 18th-century sites around Philadelphia, such as Fairmount Park, the 1767 country manor Cliveden, and Mount Pleasant, the 1760s Georgian mansion.

Tang, a U.S.-based civil engineer with an MBA from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, was the key link, acting as translator and liaison for developer and architect.

"They expressed an interest in architectural styles, in East Coast late-18th-century, mainly Georgian and Federal styles," Milner said.

"Southern Hill 1910 was the name of the neighborhood," which was established around that year, Tang said.

The developer was intrigued by the urban-design aspect of U.S. houses laid out on a city grid, as well as by Philadelphia's late-18th-century architecture.

Challenges in China? Milner and his firm have had a few. One was design by committee.

"Sometimes, there were 30 people in the room in a typical meeting," Milner said, including local engineers, construction managers, marketing personnel, and the developer's personal designer. "It was exhausting because meetings lasted all day. But ultimately, they developed confidence in us."

Master bedrooms had to face south, or potential buyers would not be interested, according to the Chinese marketers.

"We were selling these houses to the richest people in the city, so the style had to be acceptable to local buyers," Tang said. The model home was a hit, and, he says, "the first Georgian-style house ever in China."

With Barbara Gisel of Haverford, Milner created interior spaces with proportions and woodwork based on classical Western design. In addition to designing the buildings, the Milner firm furnished them fully, and provided selected fabrics, accessories, artwork, and lighting.

For interiors such as the library, Milner purchased books "by the yard" - volumes from Baldwin's Book Barn in West Chester, as well as art from Somerville Manning Gallery in Wilmington. Milner added that the Chinese marketing team was "shocked" that the library was painted blue: "They were used to dark woods only."

Milner also discovered that black picture frames were appropriate only for photos of the dead. "That was minor, but important and had to be part of the design discussion," Tang said.

For the exteriors, Milner brought American bricks to China. "The texture of our bricks is different. They're not smooth and machine-made, like in China," he said.

He even brought a brick-pointing tool made by a Philadelphia mason to "show them how to get the right joint between the bricks. Then the Chinese made their own tools from that."

"The team really followed John's instructions," Tang said.

Milner's drawings for woodwork were created from scratch, for an authentic Philadelphia look and texture.

"That's what made the project so impressive," Tang added. "It wasn't just a copycat."