An introduction to Forbes, Fab Luxe, and the thirteen acres that connect them.
A long-form letter from the editors — on a name that is older than most countries in the world, on the project that now carries it in India, and on the quiet obsession with craft that defines both.
By The Forbes Property Editors
Place Greater Noida West
Published April 2026
Read 14 minutes
Chapter 01 · The Name
A hundred and seven years of not looking away
Forbes began in 1917 in a small office in midtown Manhattan with a single motto: the purpose of business is to produce happiness, not to pile up money. It was a strange thing to say in 1917 and it is a stranger thing to say in 2026. But in the hundred and seven years between those two dates, the name Forbes has become something larger than a magazine, larger than a list, larger than its founders could reasonably have imagined.
Today, the Forbes brand touches wealth, entrepreneurship, innovation, lifestyle and — now, in India — real estate. It is the most trusted source of the Forbes 400, the Forbes Global 2000 and the World's Billionaires list. It has offices in thirty-seven countries and publications in twenty-seven languages. But underneath all of that reach, the original editorial instinct has never really left the building: look closely, report honestly, and trust the reader to do the rest.
When Forbes Global Properties was founded as the real estate arm of the Forbes brand, it was not created to compete with brokerages — there are already tens of thousands of those. It was created to do for luxury real estate what Forbes magazine has always done for business: curate, verify, and hold to a standard that no individual broker could possibly maintain on their own. That standard now has offices in New York, London, Dubai, Lisbon, Monaco, Sydney, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and — since 2024 — India.
"Forbes does not sell houses. Forbes selects the ones that are worth writing about, and then finds the owners who are worth writing for."
— From the founding editorial memo of Forbes Global Properties, 2020
This is the inheritance that Forbes Global Properties India walks into. It is a heavy inheritance. It is also, we think, exactly the right amount of pressure to put on ourselves — because if you are going to attach the Forbes name to a tower in Greater Noida West, you had better make sure that tower holds up.
The double-height lobby at Fab Luxe — marble walls, a crystal chandelier, and the quiet signal that you have arrived somewhere considered.
Why we are building in Greater Noida West, and not somewhere else
A fair question — and one we were asked often in the early planning sessions. Why not Gurugram, where the trophy buyers already live? Why not Lutyens, where the money already is? Why not Bangalore, where the tech is? Why, of all the places in India, Greater Noida West?
The answer is, strangely, the same answer that Forbes magazine gave in 1917 when it chose to cover business from the point of view of the reader rather than the point of view of Wall Street. You do not build lasting things in the places that are already finished. You build them in the places that are still being decided.
Greater Noida West is being decided right now. Over the next five years, it will receive the new Noida International Airport at Jewar, the extension of the Aqua Line metro, the completion of the FNG Expressway, and the launch of the Noida Film City. The infrastructure spend committed to this corridor between 2024 and 2030 is larger than the total infrastructure spend on Gurugram between 2000 and 2015. We are, in very literal terms, watching the next Gurugram being built — except this time the buyers will see the skyline go up in real time rather than arriving after it is already unaffordable.
Sector 4 sits at the entrance of that corridor. It is the highest ground in the extension. It is the first plot inside the gated zone. It borders a twenty-two-acre central park and it is seven minutes from the Aqua Line metro station. And it was — until last year — an empty parcel waiting for someone patient enough to do it properly.
What "properly" means
In Indian real estate, "luxury" has become a word without a referent. It is written on hoardings next to every tower that uses double-height lobbies, marble-clad elevator banks and stock photography of a family in white linen. That is not luxury. That is the packaging of luxury, mass-produced.
Our private working definition of luxury, the one we argued about for a month before the site plan was finalised, is this: luxury is the absence of compromise on the things the resident actually touches every day. The ceiling height. The quality of the air. The shower pressure. The turning radius of the parking ramp. The acoustic privacy between a child's bedroom and the adjacent apartment. The delay between pressing an elevator call button and the doors opening. None of these things are visible in a brochure. All of them are visible after three months of living.
When we sat down to draft the brief for Fab Luxe Residences, we listed fifty-four of these invisible specifications and refused to sign off on the site plan until every one of them could be answered. Three of them required a redesign of the central air handling unit. Two of them required a different contractor for the elevators. One of them required us to reduce the total number of apartments by twenty-two, because the tower-to-tower spacing we wanted was not possible at the original density. We did all of it. That is what "properly" means.
"The luxury buyer does not want a more expensive version of a normal apartment. The luxury buyer wants the apartment that a normal buyer will never get."
— Internal design brief, Forbes Fab Luxe Residences, Q3 2024
We think the resulting project is the first in India that can honestly carry the word. That is a strong claim and we do not expect everyone to believe it on sight — which is precisely why we invite every serious buyer to inspect it on their own terms and arrive at their own judgment.
The landscaped gardens at Fab Luxe — purpose-led pathways, palm-lined promenades and the kind of green that earns itself over time.
Forbes Fab Luxe Residences is thirteen acres of gated ground in Sector 4 Greater Noida West, holding eleven G+35 towers, six hundred and thirty-two residences, a thirty-five thousand square foot clubhouse, sixty-four lifestyle amenities, a twenty-two-acre central park running along its eastern boundary, and the first building-wide AQI management system installed on any Indian residential tower.
Those are the numbers. Here are the human terms.
On the air
The Delhi-NCR air quality index is above 300 for more than two hundred days a year. Anyone who has lived here knows what that means — it means you stop running outside in November, you stop opening windows in December, and you find yourself sleeping badly by January. At Fab Luxe, we built a twin-stage HEPA and activated carbon filtration system into the central air handling units of every tower. The system is permanently monitored and maintains an indoor AQI below fifty, regardless of outdoor conditions. It is the first implementation of building-wide AQI management on a residential project in India and it adds approximately seven per cent to the construction cost per square foot. We priced it in from day one.
On the space
The smallest residence on the estate is two thousand six hundred and ninety square feet of carpet. That is larger than the largest three-bedroom apartment available in most competitor projects in Sector 4. The ceilings are ten feet clear everywhere and eleven feet clear in the living and dining rooms. The living-room-to-balcony transition is a three-panel sliding door that opens the entire façade, not a single French window. These are decisions that cost money and they are decisions that no resident will ever thank us for — but they are the decisions that will make the apartment feel different the moment a guest walks in.
On the clubhouse
The Fab Luxe clubhouse is thirty-five thousand square feet on three levels. It contains a fifty-metre lap pool, a children's pool, a fully equipped gymnasium, a yoga pavilion, a spa with steam and sauna, squash and badminton courts, a private theatre, a multipurpose banquet hall, a business lounge, a library, a co-working suite, a cigar room, a wine cellar, a pet spa and a twenty-four-hour concierge desk. There are sixty-four amenities in total across the estate, which is the highest amenity count on any single residential project in Greater Noida West — higher than the second-place project by a factor of two.
On the independent oversight
Construction is independently monitored by the National Buildings Construction Corporation — NBCC — a public sector undertaking of the Government of India. Every milestone is independently inspected, and the reports are made available to buyers on request. This was not a legal requirement. We chose it because we wanted the answer to the question "how do I know the builder is not cutting corners" to be a sentence that ends with "because NBCC has signed it off."
The thirty-five thousand square foot Fab Luxe clubhouse — sixty-four amenities, a fifty-metre pool and the quiet centre of the thirteen-acre estate.The AQI management system in action — a digital display showing an indoor reading of 20, while the gardens maintain their engineered calm.
Who is actually building this, and why you should trust them
A luxury residential project is, at the end of the day, a promise that will take four years to keep. The name on the signboard matters less than the people behind the name. Here is who they are.
Forbes Global Properties India operates under the global Forbes Global Properties framework — the real estate arm of Forbes, headquartered in New York. The India operation is led by a team of six principal partners with an average of twenty-two years of experience in Indian real estate, three of whom previously led luxury residential programmes at DLF, Oberoi Realty and Godrej Properties. The board includes two non-executive directors from Forbes New York and one independent director who was formerly a senior partner at a Big Four audit practice in India.
The Fab Luxe project team is led by a project director who spent eleven years delivering residential projects for a major Mumbai developer before joining Forbes. The architect of record is a firm with eighteen years of experience in high-rise residential design in NCR. The structural engineer is the same firm that engineered three of the tallest residential towers in Gurugram. The MEP consultant has certified nine IGBC Platinum residential projects. The contractor is a Tier-1 construction company with direct execution experience on residential towers above 120 metres. None of these firms were chosen because of their quoted rate. All of them were chosen because of their track record of finishing what they start, on time, to the specification that was promised.
On our relationship with the buyer
We believe the most important relationship in a residential project is not between the developer and the contractor, or between the developer and the architect — it is between the developer and the buyer, and that relationship has to survive four years of construction, one possession handover, and two decades of living. We have therefore committed to publish quarterly project updates directly to every buyer, including independent NBCC progress reports, photography from the site, delivery forecasts and any changes to scope or specification. No PR glossing, no selective disclosure, no "minor adjustments" buried in clause eighteen of a contract amendment. Our buyers will always know exactly what is happening on their floor.
If this sounds like a low bar, that is because it is a low bar. The reason we are naming it out loud is that in Indian real estate it is still, astonishingly, a bar that few developers clear.
If you have read this far, you are either a prospective buyer, a serious real estate enthusiast, or a competitor — and we are glad to have all three. Here is what we would suggest.
If you are a prospective buyer, come see the site. Not the glossy sample apartment inside a rented Noida showroom, though we have one of those too. The actual site. Walk the thirteen acres. Stand where your balcony will be. Look east toward the central park and west toward the Aqua Line. Ask our project team anything. Ask them about the air handling units. Ask about the lift cycle time. Ask about the turning radius in the basement. If they cannot answer, we have failed at our job. If they can, then you will know why we think this is the right time to buy.
If you are a real estate enthusiast, we would love your scepticism. Write to the editorial team at editors@forbesproperty.in and tell us what we are missing. Every good magazine story has at least one source that disagreed with the thesis, and we would rather hear that source before possession than after.
If you are a competitor, welcome. The Indian residential market is large enough for all of us and, frankly, the more developers who take the word "luxury" seriously, the better it is for every buyer in the country. You can reach us at the same address.
— The Forbes Property Editors, Greater Noida West, April 2026
