As stated here one can change the name of a project. However, it only changes the name of the project and it will not change the folder structure.
As an example if your project is called sample1 and it resides ~/user1/development/IdeaProjects/sample1, the folder location won't be changed to ~/user1/development/IdeaProjects/sample2 if one changes the project name to sample2.
解决方案
It seems that one has to right click on the project (after following the instructions to rename the Project), then choose Refactor -> Move to relocate project to the new location. I didn't find any solution to rename and move a project at once.