If you fear going to Forum for the lack of elbow room and parking space, here’s something to look forward to.

The Elgin Road mall is growing horizontally, with a chic annexe housing luxury brands and a helix-slab parking structure to slot 550 cars. The extension, titled The Courtyard at Forum, will be ready by Puja 2007.

“We are trying to re-jig the retail mix of Forum to meet the changing needs and aspirations of our different sets of customers, while rejuvenating the choking access points with ample parking space,” Rahul Saraf, developer and managing director of Forum, tells Metro.

The Courtyard at Forum, coming up on what used to be the Calcutta International School campus, will have 40,000 sq ft of luxury retail spread across three levels (basement, ground and first) and the spiral car park to be housed between the second and sixth levels to allow easy access to the shop stops.

“Forum was conceptualised as one of the early malls in the country, besides Ansal Plaza and Crossroads, to give Calcutta an enhanced shopping experience. Mall culture was yet to pick up then. Today, the customer is much more demanding and we can’t afford to be deprived of the Louis Vuittons of this world any more,” declares Saraf.

So, the retail space in Forum-plus will be all about the Armanis, Versaces and Louis Vuittons.

J.P. Agrawal, who created Forum, is designing The Courtyard as well. “It will be a minimalist and very sophisticated exterior, with the cube-like, monolithic structure making a bold statement. All the floors will be connected to Forum through bridges and corridors, including the lift shaft in the annexe, so that people can park on the level they want to access,” says the architect.

While the new-age extension would woo upmarket footfall with an eye on FDI being now allowed in single-brand retail, the original mall will also undergo a layered metamorphosis.

“We will convert Forum into a boutique mall in three years by re-zoning the retail racks and moving out a few mid-rung brands which may not be in sync with the projected product-mix,” says Saraf.

Forum anchors Shoppers’ Stop and INOX are likely to rise to the occasion and take their respective formats “a notch higher”.

If the time seems ripe for a big bite into the $444-million luxury pie, still only a fraction of the country’s total retail market of $202 billion, it’s born out of a belief that tomorrow’s industry will be “more mature than hype”.

Retail space analyst Anuj Puri of property consultants Trammell Crow Meghraj says: “We are now ready for the luxury brands, not just premium labels like Marks & Spencer. However, a Mont Blanc or an Armani would always like to be located in the heart of the city, where there aren’t too many greenfield projects. So, we will see a lot of space juggling happening in downtown retail addresses like Forum.”