The team behind the development set to alter the base area of Keystone Resort is now shooting for a winter 2025 opening as opposed to the previously planned summer 2025 opening.  

Talks around the development have lingered in Summit County for over 25 years before the Kindred Development Team began bringing the ideas to fruition in 2022. The project encompasses three buildings, including a 107-room hotel, three restaurants, 95 luxury condos, a ski school, event space and more.

Kindred’s General Manager Dan Dohner said there are many variables that impact building timelines, and one of the most significant ones for his team was tariff talks. He said they felt the impacts that much of the construction industry did in early spring amid economic uncertainty spurred by President Donald Trump’s talks around tariff proposals. He said they had the benefit of being well into construction by that time, and the teams had a good portion of the materials they needed to build. Pivoting from the original plans also prolonged the process, he said, such as the decision to expand the area where boot check for the hotel will be. 

He said the development team and the construction team, PCL Construction, had to “pivot and adapt” to the impacts the tariff talks threw their way and dial in on strategic planning to keep the project on budget and on a timeline that worked.

“When you’re dancing around a tariff, you know the arrival day of something can cost you $200,000, and so you’re just making sure that you’re playing that the right way,” he said. 

“In some cases, we’ve pulled back on orders and found stuff where we’ve had to pay a more expensive (price) but got it domestically because it was less than the tariff,” he added.  

Kindred head of marketing Amy Kemp said the project team is shooting to open the resort by the 2025-26 ski season. She said reservations are live now, with the earliest date to reserve currently set at Dec. 12. Dohner said a grand opening could come even sooner.

The two said while the project’s timeline has been altered, the approximate $300 million price tag hasn’t.

Dohner said the hotel and 62 of the luxury residences, called the west tower, are on track to be completed first, and the east tower with the remaining 33 luxury residences will follow.

The construction team has made significant headway on many of the luxury residences, most of which are sold. Dohner said thankfully the team already had, or ordered, key materials to finish the inside of the residences ahead of tariff talks, so there weren’t many delays on that front.

Curating something different for Keystone

With construction well underway, the Kindred team is now focusing on a public art collection. Dohner said the team is looking to emulate some of the public art collections people will see in Yellowstone, Park City and Vail. It’s something he said they felt was missing from Summit County.

The first piece in the collection was installed in late May and is a sculptural bench inspired by Keystone’s three peaks. When it comes to this aspect of the development, he said the ownership team “could have went cheap, and they didn’t.

Kemp said they brought on Denver-based art organization NINE dot Arts to help curate the collection, and it was by no means a hands-off process for the Kindred Development Team, led by Shervin (Shevy) Rashidi, Ryan Geller and Scott Russell.

“They were intimately involved in the decision of every single piece of artwork that is going into this project, which, again, an ownership team, a development team, typically, is not as involved in every single design,” she said.

Dohner said the group is also looking to make Kindred Resort as focused on history as possible. He said while Summit County has a historical society that does a great job shedding light on Keystone’s history, there isn’t a Keystone-specific historical organization, and Kindred is looking to fill that void.

“Who are the Dercums? Who are the Myers? Who is Bergman? Those are the stories we are looking to tell,” he said.

Much of the resort plays on the area’s mining history. Even the rug of the resort’s lobby is inspired by an aerial photo of the Argentine Mine District and different lounges and rooms give a nod to famous peaks and landmarks.

The restaurant group behind Sauce on the Blue, which Rashidi is a part-owner of, will run two of the three restaurants in Kindred. Chef Eric Berggren will return to Summit County after clocking in 20 years in the fine dining scene to help lead two spots: Kinji, a sushi and Asian fusion restaurant, and Goodz Tavern, which will offer classic ski town dishes with a high-end twist. 

The third restaurant pays homage to a woman who the community considers a pivotal figure in Keystone and Summit County history, Lula Myers. An inspiration for the Keystone Resort ski trail “Schoolmarm,” Meyers was a beloved school teacher who arrived in Summit in the early 1900s.

In the center of three, 52-foot-tall towers, two of which are for condos and one of which is for the hotel, will be a courtyard with an astroturf field, fire pits and yard games overlooking the River Run Gondola.