Bernard Arnault, the retailing CEO who's ranked as the world's wealthiest person, is helping to bankroll one of the longest covered walkways on Earth as the latest part of his backing of the construction of the luxury Royalmount Mall in Montreal.

Local attention has been drawn in recent weeks to the installation of the final prefabricated section on the 200-metre footbridge, a span just 50 metres short of what the Guinness Book of World Records calls the world's longest covered passageway, located in Pickering, Ontario. The Royalmount span, one of several to be built of late in Montreal, is designed to offer access to public transit users from the metro system to a new luxury shopping hub that's the city's largest private real estate investment in decades and set to become Canada's second-biggest mall.

For greater Montreal, the CA$50 million bridge is a sign that the construction going on since 2019 is about to result in shopping opportunities. Royalmount's first phase, with 824,000 square feet of retail including a section called Luxury Row, is now expected to open in August to provide a high-end shopping hub that has been lacking in Montreal. Arnault has family ties to the city but his name has rarely been mentioned in connection to the Royalmount mall project.

The 75-year-old, Paris-based Arnault, who built his fortune through the LVMH luxury apparel company that he runs, tops lists from both Forbes and Bloomberg as the world’s richest person with a net worth of more than US$220 billion that is ahead of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Arnault is a major investor in the mall through L. Catterton, a private equity company in Connecticut that Arnault helped create in 2016 that co-develops large mixed-use projects anchored by luxury retailers.

Publicly traded LVMH, owner of a retail empire that includes Louis Vuitton and Sephora, also directly owns real estate assets, mainly in the form of stores and offices. LVMH attempted to build a hotel in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles last year but was rebuffed by a popular vote. LVMH does not generally develop properties, whereas L. Catterton has developments in Miami, Hong Kong and Vancouver.

Luxury retail demand is climbing, with global upscale retailers such as LVMH and French giant Kering — parent of high-end brands Gucci and Balenciaga — rolling out more stores to grab a bigger share of luxury retail sales in the United States and other countries, according to a JLL report last year. The rivals have now been snapping up properties at hefty prices, bolstering their brick-and-mortar portfolios.

LVMH has opened its wallet wide. Last year it completed an estimated US$500 million revamp of the Tiffany & Co. flagship on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan after LVMH acquired the upscale jewelry retailer in 2021 for US$15.8 billion. In December, LVMH acquired 150 Champs-Élysées, in Paris' 8th arrondissement, for roughly 1 billion euros, in a deal touted as the biggest deal in France last year. That property is slated to be redeveloped as a hotel.

Earlier this year, Kering paid US$963 million for a 115,000-square-foot luxury retail space at 715-717 Fifth Ave. in New York. And in December, Italian fashion house Prada Group agreed to buy the building at 724 Fifth that houses its New York flagship for US$425 million.

When the Royalmount's first phase opens in August it is expected to have luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Michael Kors, Tiffany & Co., Versace and the L. Catterton-backed Rennaï health and beauty flagship store. L. Catterton first partnered in the Royalmount project with Carbonleo, a real estate development company led by Andrew Lutfy. Carbonleo achieved previous retail success in Montreal when it built a prospering DIX30 shopping centre on the city’s south shore.

An initiative to include 3,000 residential units in the Royalmount project was voted down by residents of the Town of Mount Royal, the municipality where the mall is located. Phase one will cost an estimated CA$1 billion and the entire complex is slated to cost about CA$7 billion upon completion. The Royalmount Mall will eventually include 2.8 million square feet of retail upon completion, ranking it behind only the West Edmonton Mall's 3.8 million square feet as the largest in the country.

Arnault is no stranger to Montreal, as his wife Hélène Mercier is a concert pianist from the Outremont neighbourhood of the city. Some of their three sons attended university in Montreal and Arnault’s Montreal in-laws include Jean-François Mercier, a plastic surgeon, while his late father-in-law François Mercier was an accomplished lawyer named to the Order of Canada. Arnault and Hélène Mercier have shed light on their philosophies and personal histories in a pair of autobiographies.

The newly completed Royalmount skybridge is one of a series of eye-catching overhead pedestrian passageways that have risen around and above Montreal over the past few years. For decades such structures were virtually banned in Montreal, as elected officials and architectural authorities frowned on overhead structures, preferring to connect properties underground.

However, recently completed overhead-covered walkways include another lengthy passageway belonging to CP Infra that hovers over the Du Quartier REM transit train station to Devimco's Solar Uniquartier mixed-use complex. Devimco has also built a bridge linking a pair of towers in a structure high above ground in its downtown Maestria project. And city authorities have also planned to build another such covered pedestrian structure over Highway 40, near the Kirkland REM transit train station in the western side of the city.

Canada's undisputed leader in overhead passageway structures remains Calgary, where the Plus 15 network links 86 downtown buildings over 16 kilometres. Many Calgarians take pride in their city's skybridge network but it has its detractors.

Byron Miller, a professor of geography at the University of Calgary, told CoStar News in an email that in some cases skybridges "take pedestrian traffic off the street level, which can have a devastating effect on sidewalk level activity and business, as well as public safety."

The skybridge at the Royalmount project aims to sidestep those shortcomings by serving to take pedestrian traffic from mass transit directly to businesses at the sprawling retail hub.

CoStar News' reporter Linda Moss contributed to this article.