“I have no idea whether Chinese architects can do this,” said Mr. Wang, in an interview from Shanghai. “Maybe they can  but I didn’t want to take that risk. In China there was no development like this. The villa market is rather young in China.”

Image Stuart Silk was commissioned to design nine custom homes near Shanghai with no instructions on style or budget. Credit... Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Each of Mr. Silk’s nine designs was required to be distinct, but no stylistic guidelines materialized. For the first time in his career, he wasn’t an architect interpreting a client’s tastes and personality, but an artist facing a blank canvas. “It opened up a part of my brain that hadn’t been exercised in a while,” he says.

Mr. Silk visited the Suzhou gardens, west of Shanghai, where he encountered signs interpreting the landscapes; they were written in poetic language. That prompted the idea of writing story lines from which each villa design could bud. His narrative for one home, called Bending Paths, begins in a meditative vein:

“Like rings from a stone dropped into a pond,” he wrote, “curving walls create a journey and define space.”

On the aesthetic side, Mr. Silk says, the developer “really stayed out of it  if anything, they helped us more fully realize our ideas.” As the design progressed, however, new requirements popped up, some calling for substantial redesign. Mr. Silk was surprised to learn, for example, that traditional Chinese feng shui principles meant that a front door couldn’t be positioned at the foot of a stairway, lest good fortune tumble down the stairs and roll out the door.

But over all, he said, “Working in these narratives turned out to be a real win. It’s an opportunity we don’t get in the programs we usually work with here.”

Five villa commissions went to Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects of Atlanta, a small firm known for its extroverted, edgy work. Merrill Elam, a principal in the firm, says the Chinese work came as a radical departure. The firm had never done a house that would be completed without a predetermined owner, and never had a client who expressed no aesthetic predilections.

“We had to think about the designs in a universal way,” Ms. Elam says. “Is it nice to have a small garden beside a dining room? Yes! Humans have instincts for certain things  views, light, privacy. We had to apply these notions as if we would live in the houses ourselves. They didn’t give us any clues.”