Questar Properties and Caves Valley Partners held a groundbreaking ceremony on Thursday for Sanctuary at Cross Keys, a $130 million, 331-unit luxury apartment building at The Village of Cross Keys.The six-story structure will rise at the south end of the gated community off the 5100 block of Falls Road, on land previously occupied by the Cross Keys tennis barn and a parking lot. Questar Builders Inc. is the general contractor, and construction is expected to be complete in the first quarter of 2027.“Questar looks forward to stewarding the development of Sanctuary at Cross Keys and it wants to be part of the renaissance that Caves Valley has put into place over the last few years” at Cross Keys, said Questar chairman and CEO Steve Gorn. “We want to have Sanctuary at Cross Keys…be a key cog in the continuing renaissance of Cross Keys.”Questar has had “many wonderful opportunities over the years, and we deem Sanctuary at Cross Keys foremost among those opportunities. We are very thankful for the privilege to be the owner-developer of this project and are very appreciative to the principals of Caves Valley Partners,” he said. The project is already five years in the making, said Zach Gorn, senior vice president of Questar Properties and a partner in the Sanctuary project, as is his father.“We were privileged to be awarded the project by CVP in 2021,” he said. “Since then I think as we all know it hasn’t gotten any easier to get a project like this started. First it was the pandemic and all the resulting economic shocks from that. And then it’s been rising interest rates, rising construction costs and a capital markets crunch. But through it all, this team, everybody here, has played their part and persevered and here we are today.”Caves Valley Partners (CVP), developer of The Village of Cross Keys, in 2021 selected Questar over eight other competitors to develop the former tennis barn site. The company is based in Baltimore County and has developed more than 13,000 residences in Maryland, including the $165 million 414 Light St. tower overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.As designed by KTGY of Irvine, California, Sanctuary at Cross Keys will feature amenities such as a co-working lounge with private “zoom rooms,” a full-service health and fitness club, a pet grooming salon, a “resort-quality” pool with covered cabanas and a Zen Garden with a pagoda. Rents will range from $1900 per month for a studio to around $7000 per month for a three-bedroom penthouse-townhouse unit. There are more than 50 different floor plans.“We hope to translate the success that we had at our 414 Light Street project, delivering a top-of-the-market product with hospitality -infused services, to do something similar here at Cross Keys,” Zach Gorn said. The building includes 413 parking spaces on two levels below ground. Another 60 spaces will be created on a surface lot south of the apartments, according to Arsh Mirmiran, a principal of Caves Valley Partners. To accommodate added traffic in and out of Cross Keys, he said, Caves Valley is keeping all four of the gateways that lead to Falls Road open more hours that they have in the past.Mirmiran said developer James Rouse’s original master plan for Cross Keys in the 1960s envisioned more residences and the need to accommodate additional traffic, and Caves Valley’s updated master plan similarly has been designed to accommodate additional traffic generated by the construction of more residences.“People assume an apartment building will generate more traffic than it actually does,” Mirmiran said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “Relative to commercial space, it generates a lot less traffic.”With the latest addition, he said, “we’re finishing what [Rouse] envisioned.”