In Keystone’s River Run Village, hundreds of workers toil under towering cranes on a 320,000-square-foot development that project leaders hope will be the ski area’s new centerpiece.
Kindred Resort, a more than $300-million-dollar project set to open in 2025, will house 95 luxury condominiums, a 107-room hotel, restaurants, ski school, event space and more, all steps away from the River Run Gondola.
“We’ve all been excited for a project like this to come along,” said Shervin Rashidi, a co-founder of the development team. “Keystone hasn’t really had a true base center.”
When completed, the resort will consist of three, 52-foot-tall towers, making it an area landmark on a site that has been undeveloped for 50 years. The third company to attempt such a project, Kindred Resort has been a vision nearly 10 years in the making, Rashidi said.
“Everything’s been kind of scattered for the guest experience,” he said. “With this, we’re going to elevate that experience, centralize it.”
With an endorsement from Vail Resorts, which is set to operate the planned hotel under its hospitality wing, Rashidi said the project has remained on budget and on schedule. While inflation and supply chain issues since the COVID-19 pandemic have provided challenges, Rashidi said the development has been able to avoid some of the pitfalls of other projects.
“We did a good job with OZ Architecture when it comes to overall design. A lot of our walls and steel structure and so forth are pre-manufactured and then brought in,” Rashidi said. “So that’s helped us avoid a lot of those bigger supply-side issues.”
Kindred Resort is expected to open in phases, with its west tower condominiums and central tower hotel possibly opening within the first three months of 2025. Following that will be the east tower, which will house the resort’s highest-end units.
To date, nearly 70% of the planned residential units have been sold, Rashidi said, all ranging in price and size. A summer and fall release of seven homes included one- to four-bedroom units priced at $1.4 million to $4.5 million, respectively.
According to Marketing Director Amy Kemp, 77% of buyers are out-of-state, with some international. Just under a quarter are Colorado residents.
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While much of the building will be occupied for private use, developers said they made public, communal space a high priority for the project. Kindred’s centerpiece, a sprawling plaza between two of its three towers, will serve as a public courtyard where residents and visitors alike can enjoy outdoor restaurant seating, fire pits and lawn games — with Keystone’s mountainside serving as the backdrop.
“We keep calling it the living room of Keystone,” said Amy Kemp, the project’s marketing director.
Other publicly-accessible areas include a ground-floor ski school and rental shop as well as a spa on the east side. The resort’s various spaces, both residential and business, are divided between the three towers and connected by an underlying base. Project leaders said this helps to reduce any obstruction of surrounding views and provide more open space.
“We didn’t want to have this huge, heavy mass. We wanted it to fit into its environment,” said project co-founder Ryan Geller.
As part of Summit County’s building requirements, the project will also include off-site employee housing in Keystone, which is expected to provide roughly 50 beds.
Geller said he is optimistic the development will remain on track with hundreds of workers on site each day. Now on the cusp of realizing a vision nearly a decade in the making, project leaders said they believe Kindred Resort will serve as a landmark even beyond Summit County.
“We wanted something that was iconic for not just Keystone, but the entire ski industry,” Geller said.