Image: Park Royal Shopping Centre

' first Vancouver-area store will open in the fall of 2015 at West Vancouver's

. It will be about 105,000 square feet. It will be located in Park Royal South: the mall is comprised of a disconnected north and south portion, separated by West Vancouver's Marine Drive.

By 2015, it will be the third Simons store to be located outside of the province of Quebec. Its first out-of-Quebec store

opened last year at West Edmonton Mall

, and a Simons store

will open at an expanded Rideau Centre in Ottawa in 2015

We hinted at Simons' opening at Park Royal last week

when we published an article

mentioning that we thought Simons would unveil plans for a Vancouver-area store this month. Astute readers noticed we included a photo of West Vancouver in the article, and we even tagged Park Royal for readers to potentially pick up the clue. The announcement is official so we're now able to openly report on it.

Simons is continuing its cross-Canada expansion and

is currently negotiating for space at Toronto's Yorkdale Shopping Centre and Mississauga's Square One Shopping Centre

. Simons is interested in space that will be vacated by Sears Canada, which

sold its leases back to landlord Oxford Properties

in both of the above malls.

Simons is also said to be seeking retail space in Calgary and possibly Winnipeg. We'll elaborate more on this soon.

La Maison Simons will be part of a $150 million renovation and expansion of Park Royal Shopping Centre. The project will see new stores, new brands and a modernization of the shopping complex. We'll follow up this article with renderings and floorplans of parts of the expansion. In all, the project will include about 300,000 square feet of new and reconfigured retail space, including an outdoor "village" shopping area.

Park Royal is the second-largest mall in the Vancouver area. It's about 1.2 million square feet and has over 280 stores. The mall is located in West Vancouver, one of Canada's wealthiest municipalities. The mall's expansion will bring it to over 1.3 million square feet.

Today (Friday) we will interview Peter Simons to obtain further details on his company's

cross-Canada expansion

[

Park Royal website

]

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La Maison Simons website

]