The town of Bal Harbour orbits meteorically around their marquee shopping mall, Bal Harbour Shops, with its collection of obscenely luxurious stores. And the Shops are doing, economically, pretty damn well. It's one of the most successful (perhaps THE most successful) malls in the country. (Where's a retail market analyst when you need one. Damn girl)
Despite an exodus en masse of the entire LVMH arsenal from Bal Harbour Shops to the Design District, the Mall says they have signed a slew of new tenants to take LVMH's place, and are expanding from their current size of 450,000 square feet with another 200,000 of retail square footage and a whole new wing to the west. That wing will go where the Church by the Sea and Bal Harbour Town Hall are now, with a new church and town to be built nearby. Where? Well, the plans above - which I have just been told are out of date - show the church and hall on much less land, far to the west. You can see them squeezed in around an entry drive to the mall in the second image above. Newer plans, however, are being drawn up as we speak, so we don't really know, although one can't imagine that the situation will change that much. The architects are Zyscovich (yawn!), Mark Hampton, and Maria Sellek, with a landscape design by, predictably, Raymond Jungles.
What new shopping delights do we get in that new wing of Miami's bling-est mall? Well, Alexander McQueen, Moncler, and Canali have recently moved in, along with swiss watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen. It looks like half of the new wing will go to current tenants and half will go to the waiting list (Yes, there's a waiting list. No, we haven't been told who's on it). We also see a Cinebistro dine-in luxury movie theater, a new specialty department store (rumors are it's Bloomingdale's or Bergdorf Goodman, which Bal Harbour Shops had been in talks with, which would make it the first Bergdorf's outside out New York).
