The new store, scheduled to open in 2009, will be built on what is a parking lot north of the existing store, company spokeswoman Brooke White said. A mall spokeswoman said a parking garage will be built to compensate for lost spaces.
Unlike in downtown Salt Lake City, where Nordstrom is closing a store on Jan. 21 and won't open a new one until 2011, the old Fashion Place store will close one night, with the new store opening within walking distance the next morning.
"We've done this type of thing before and we've got it down to science," White said.
The space vacated by Nordstrom will be "reconfigured" and expanded by about 40,000 square feet to accommodate multiple retail tenants and restaurants, said Tamara DeMilt, Fashion Place spokeswoman.
She provided few other details about the mall expansion, beyond adding that a parking structure would have to be built because so much surface parking would disappear.
"Nordstrom was the first step in the process. . . . We have a rough idea of what we're going to do now but not an exact footprint," she said.
In addition to its downtown Salt Lake City and Murray locations, Nordstrom operates a store in Orem and a discount-oriented Nordstrom Rack in the Sugar House area of Salt Lake City.
Although it is expanding in Murray, Nordstrom is downsizing in downtown Salt Lake. Its store there, which opened in 1980 and has about 140,000 square feet of space, will be replaced by a new 124,000-square-foot store set to open in 2011. It will be in City Creek Center, a new development built where the Crossroads Plaza and ZCMI Center malls are now.
Although the new store "will be smaller, it's going to feel as big as the current store - or bigger - because of the way we build stores today," White said.
She said no changes are planned for the Orem store, which opened in 2002 and has about 122,000 square feet of space. The Nordstrom Rack in Salt Lake City, which opened in 1991, is the smallest of the Utah Nordstrom stores with about 31,000 square feet of space.
lesley@sltrib.com
