Senior living facility opens in Great Falls, filling major housing need

A much-discussed senior living community is now open in Great Falls.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held last month to open the Residence at Colvin Run at 1131 Walker Road. In attendance were a few local officials, including Dranesville District Supervisor John Foust.

The 53,000-square-foot facility is being run by IntegraCare, which also operates a senior living facility in Hunters Woods on Colt Neck Road.

The one on Walker Road is on nearly three acres of land near the Colvin Run Mill historic site. It has 62 units in a mix of assisted living apartments and memory care residents for adults 65 and older.

Amenities include a fitness center, an art studio, a theater with an audio system that pairs with hearing aids, an aviary with finches, a rustic-inspired pub, and a trail connecting to neighborhood businesses. It will also bring more than 50 jobs to the community.

The facility fills a need for senior housing in Great Falls, where more than a third of the population is over 55 years old. Residents 65 and older make up about 14% of Fairfax County’s total population.

“In our experiences, we’ve found that seniors want to continue to live in the communities that they raised their families in,” IntegraCare CEO Larry Rouvelas said at the groundbreaking in April 2021. “The need to build senior housing communities in the specific neighborhoods that people grew up in is an important part of their quality of life.”

The project was first proposed more than four years ago and got the county’s approval in early 2019.

Foust has been a supporter of the project since the beginning. He told Reston Now last year that the current demand for senior living communities “far exceeds any supply that we’ve been able to create.”

Having grown up in Great Falls, Rouvelas said in the press release that the Residence at Colvin Run is a community that “will make the parents of my friends proud.”

“The parents of my friends here carpooled me and fed me at their dinner tables,” he said. “Decades later, when the opportunity arose to run a senior housing community in Great Falls, I jumped at the chance. We will run a community that will make the parents of my friends proud.”