TEMECULA - A range of upscale restaurant and retail chains will enter Southwest County in early 2009 with an open-air expansion at The Promenade, the shopping center's owners said Wednesday.

Those chains include the Yard House, a brewery and restaurant; Williams-Sonoma, a cookware store; Pottery Barn, a purveyor of home decorations; and Chico's, a clothing store, representatives of Ohio-based Forest City Enterprises said.

The row of shops and eateries, which total 126,000 square feet, will extend eastward on the east side of the mall, between Macy's department store and the Edwards movie theater. Steel rebar for the pillars of a parking garage are already rising alongside the site; it's expected to be completed by May, according to the owners.

Along with renovations inside and outside the million-square-foot mall, the expansion will cost about $100 million, said Kenneth Lee, Forest City's chief of West Coast development. Shops and restaurants are expected to begin opening in the spring of 2009, Lee said.

Lee and Temecula Mayor Chuck Washington cast the planned addition as the latest sign of Southwest County's growing affluence. In the last three years, Temecula, Murrieta and Wine Country have gotten their first developments of million-dollar houses and their first office buildings categorized as "Class A" for their lofty atriums and shiny glass exteriors.

"This mall was built nine years ago," Lee said. "Back then, it was a younger city, a younger community. The demographic has really moved upward."

Forest City is billing the expansion as a "lifestyle center," a relatively new class of shopping centers that includes outdoor walkways and more sit-down restaurants than traditional enclosed malls. Others include Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga, which Forest City developed in 2004, and The River, a smaller shopping center in Rancho Mirage.

The Promenade last expanded, to 1.05 million square feet, in late 2004. Its expansion over the next 18 months is expected to be its last. The developer's initial agreement with the city in 1999 gave it until January 2007 to complete construction of buildings totalling 1.18 million square feet. The council granted a three-year extension last year.

Washington said he expects more social interaction in the new wing than in the existing mall.

"We'll make plans to meet here," he said. "We'll shop here. We'll live here."

Yard House has planned to expand into Southwest Riverside County for more than a year, but hadn't found a suitable location, founder and chief executive Steele Platt said in an interview Wednesday. The Irvine-based chain has 18 locations nationwide, including Victoria Gardens, The River, and San Diego's Gaslamp District.

"Being a large sit-down restaurant like that, you really don't want to be inside the mall," Platt said.

Platt had eyed Murrieta's Golden Triangle, a 60-acre area bounded by I-15, I-215 and Murrieta Hot Springs Road, with some degree of seriousness. But a 658,000-square-foot development by Lewis Retail Centers became the fourth consecutive plan to fall through, in August 2006. The Garrett Group, of Temecula, and Domenigoni Barton Properties, which owns the land, laid out plans for a 1.3 million-square-foot development earlier this year.

Southwest County diners have frequently mentioned Yard House as a chain they'd like to have here, often in the same breath as BJ's, an Orange County-based brewery and restaurant that opened last year at Ynez Road and Overland Drive, just a stone's throw from The Promenade. Forest City has discussed plans for at least two other restaurants, though representatives declined Wednesday to say which, if any, have committed.

Steve Hamlin, a longtime chef and caterer, said he believes Yard House will indeed enhance the local dining scene.

But Hamlin, who owned and ran Allie's at Callaway restaurant from 2002 through 2006 and plans to open Allie's Tapas au Vin cafe in January on nearby Overland Drive, also bemoaned the prevalence of corporate chains, whose menus he called formulaic.

"I welcome somebody like Yard House more than casual dining because it isn't so generic," Hamlin said. "But the chains are wearing me out."

- Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.