Shanghai opens door wide for Seattle architect; Swedish plans expansion

"Made in China" may be a ubiquitous tag on products sold here, but newly wealthy Chinese millionaires of Shanghai are looking for the "Designed in America" label.

That's how Seattle architect Stuart Silk got the most unusual commission of his career — an assignment to design nine unique luxury homes in whatever style he chose, with no owner looking over his shoulder.

His firm is among a handful of U.S. architects hired for a speculative 79-home luxury subdivision outside of Shanghai. His contemporary creations for the Zhongkai Sheshan Villa project, with wide swaths of glass and strong geometric forms hovering alongside ponds or waterfalls, are now under construction.

The developers' pitch, says Silk, is that "the Armanis of the United States" conceived these $7.5 million to $15 million homes.

The cachet of American and European designers is so strong in China that the developers "felt that they could command much higher prices because of the mystique of architects from elsewhere," says Silk.

While speculative construction has ground to a halt in the U.S., Chinese authorities are trying to cool down their frenzied real-estate market by raising interest rates and limiting how many apartments a family can buy.

"There is definitely a real-estate madness," says Silk. But if the villa development is successful, he expects it will spawn imitators.

In the U.S., he says, large residential developments never have entirely unique homes because of the prohibitive cost. Instead, elements are combined in various ways so that "many houses are close cousins of each other."

But the strict mandate for Zhongkai Sheshan was that "each home had to be different," says Silk, who's worked on the project for about three years.

The developer gave each of the eight architects free rein, aside from some constraints concerning height, setbacks from the street, and considerations of feng shui.

As for styles or themes, "They had two words — timeless and classic. They really didn't put any restraints on us."

Of course, there were specific functional parameters: three or four bedrooms, each with an attached bathroom; two kitchens — an American "show kitchen that nobody uses" and an adjacent Chinese kitchen "where the real cooking would be done"; a game room; and maids' rooms, sometimes as many as three.

Evidently Chinese developers are like American clients in one way: "They kept wanting more and more goodies," he says.

A consultant for the Shanghai villa project recently told The New York Times that "I have no idea whether Chinese architects can do this. ... Maybe they can — but I didn't want to take that risk. In China there was no development like this."

The New York Times, which wrote about Silk and other smallish U.S. firms winning work in China, also noted that Seattle's Olson Kundig Architects is designing a 14,000-square-foot Chinese villa.

Silk calls the current Chinese preoccupation with foreign architects "bizarre from my standpoint — they can get very good Chinese architects to do the work for a fraction of the cost."

But for now, he says, "There must be thousands and thousands of architects worldwide that are employed by China — sitting at desks in France and Germany (and the U.S.)."

$1 billion plan for

Swedish Medical

Center growth

Other sectors of the economy still may be struggling, but, judging from Swedish Medical Center's ambitious expansion plans, health care seems to be doing just fine.

The region's largest nonprofit health-care provider is planning $1 billion in new projects over the next five to 10 years, a Swedish administrator told a commercial real-estate industry forum this past week.

A 500,000-square-foot medical-office or hospital building probably will be added to the First Hill campus within the next five years, said Patrick Hollister, Swedish's administrator for corporate ventures.

Swedish operates a host of medical facilities in and around Seattle, including four hospitals. It already owns or leases 3.3 million square feet of buildings.

Projects further down the pipeline include a women's cancer center and gastrointestinal center, both slated for First Hill, Hollister said.

Also in the works: a fourth free-standing emergency room/outpatient medical center, whose location Hollister wouldn't reveal. Swedish already has similar centers in Issaquah and Redmond, and plans to open a third in Mill Creek next month.

To help finance all this, Hollister said, Swedish is selling the top two floors of its seven-story Orthopedic Center on First Hill to Unico Properties, a veteran Seattle real-estate investment firm. The floors are leased for physicians' offices.

Swedish also is looking at moving administrative offices from several far-flung city and suburban buildings to a single location outside downtown Seattle to cut costs, Hollister added.

— Eric Pryne

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