The landmark Bountiful
A building on the upper bench, in materials and dimensions
The Bountiful Temple, and the granite it is faced in.
At 640 South Bountiful Boulevard, on nine acres of the upper east bench, stands 104,000 square feet of building finished in Bethel white granite. Ground was broken on 2 May 1992, 870,361 people walked through the public open house between 5 November and 17 December 1994, and it was dedicated across a week in January 1995. This page carries the architecture, the dimensions, the dates and the siting, and nothing else.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Bountiful is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: read at the city, the Forest Service, the recreation district and the event organisers themselves, and dated so you can see when each figure was true. For the on-the-ground work here I lean on a Davis County partner agent.
Start here
104,000 square feet of Bethel white granite on nine acres of hillside.
The Bountiful Utah Temple stands at 640 South Bountiful Boulevard, on the upper east bench above the city grid. The published dimensions are a total floor area of 104,000 square feet on a nine acre site, and the exterior is finished in Bethel white granite, which is the material the church's own newsroom names. Inside, the almanac record gives four ordinance rooms and eight sealing rooms alongside a baptistry and a celestial room. Those are the building's numbers and they are the subject of this page.
It was the eighth temple built in Utah and the first in Davis County. Ground was broken on 2 May 1992, both issuer sources agree on that date, and the building was dedicated across a week in January 1995, from the 8th to the 14th, by Howard W. Hunter. The dedication ran to twenty eight sessions and was at the time the most attended temple dedication there had been, which is a fact about the building's history rather than about anybody living in Bountiful today.
Before any of that there was a public open house, and it is the strongest single number attached to the building. It ran from 5 November to 17 December 1994 and 870,361 people walked through. For scale, the city it stands above counted 45,762 residents at the 2020 census. Whatever else the building is to anybody, for six weeks in 1994 it was the thing most of the Wasatch Front went to look at, and the record of that is issuer published.
The temple, as published
104,000 sq ft
total floor area
9 acres
the site on the upper east bench
870,361
visitors to the 1994 public open house
Jan 1995
dedicated across a week, from the 8th to the 14th
The details
Two buildings, 132 years apart
This city keeps two architectural landmarks and they could not be less alike.
One stands on the bench in white granite and dates from the 1990s. The other stands on Main Street in adobe and dates from the 1860s. Put side by side as buildings, they are a fair summary of what happened to Bountiful in between.
| The Bountiful Utah Temple | The Bountiful Tabernacle | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it stands | 640 South Bountiful Boulevard, on the upper east bench above the grid | 55 South Main Street, at Main and Center, in the middle of the historic downtown |
| When it was built | Ground broken 2 May 1992; dedicated across a week in January 1995 | Begun 1857, suspended that year during the Utah Expedition, finished 1863 |
| What it is made of | Bethel white granite on the exterior, over 104,000 square feet of floor area | Adobe walls, with roof timbers fastened by wooden pegs and lumber from Holbrook Canyon |
| The style | Late twentieth century, on a nine acre hillside site designed to be seen from below | Greek Revival, designed by Augustus Farnham, on a town lot in a grid laid out in 1847 |
| What a visitor sees | The exterior and the hillside setting from Bountiful Boulevard. Nothing else is published | A streetscape landmark on a Main Street walk. No public visiting information was verified |
Materials, dates and dimensions for the temple from the church newsroom and the Church News almanac; for the Tabernacle from its National Register listing of 1976, reference number 76001813, and from published accounts of its construction, all checked 15 August 2026. The Tabernacle's construction dates come from secondary sources rather than from a single issuer document, and the National Register nomination itself is a scanned file that has not been read in full. Neither building's interior access is published anywhere checked.
Two issuer pages give two different announcement dates for this temple, so this page prints neither on its own. The church's own newsroom article states that plans to construct the temple were announced on 28 May 1988. The Church News almanac record gives 2 February 1990. Both are issuer side publications and they do not agree, and nothing published reconciles them. Every other date in the building's record is consistent across both: ground broken 2 May 1992, public open house 5 November to 17 December 1994, dedication 8 to 14 January 1995. So this page names both announcement dates and picks neither, and anything you read that states one of them flatly has quietly chosen a side. Checked 15 August 2026.
The siting
It was put where it would be seen, and that is a landscape fact rather than any other kind.
A nine acre site on the upper east bench, several hundred feet above a city datum of 4,771 feet, with a white granite building on it, is a siting decision with an obvious consequence: the building is visible from the freeway, from most of south Davis County and from a large share of the west facing windows in Bountiful. Lit at night against a dark hillside it is the most conspicuous built object in this part of the county. That is a wayfinding fact and it is the reason it belongs on a page about the place.
The practical version is the one that shows up in ordinary directions. It is the landmark people use to describe where on the bench something is, and it is the landmark used for the Holbrook Canyon trailhead, which sits just south of it and across the road, behind a brown sign. Anyone giving directions to that trailhead in Bountiful gives them relative to this building, which is a small piece of evidence for how the geography of the upper bench is organised in people's heads.
The boulevard it fronts is the other half of the siting story. Bountiful Boulevard runs north to south along the bench, and within about two miles of the temple it also carries the Holbrook trailhead, the turn onto Canyon Creek Road toward the third canyon mouth, and the city's golf course at 2430 South. Whatever else is on that road, it is the only street in Bountiful that connects a landmark, two trailheads and a course without ever dropping into the grid.
What this page will not do is describe the grounds as somewhere to go, because nothing about grounds access, opening hours, parking capacity or a visitor centre is published on any issuer page checked. The honest statement is that the grounds front Bountiful Boulevard and that anything further should come from the institution rather than from a guide. The other landmark, the one downtown, is on the Main Street page.
104,000 square feet of white granite on nine acres of hillside, put where the whole valley would see it, and that is the whole of what this page has to say about it.
The record
Every date on this page comes from one of two issuer publications.
This is a subject where secondary accounts multiply quickly and disagree quietly, so it is worth setting out what the sources actually are and where they stop.
There are two: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints newsroom article for this temple, and the Church News almanac entry for it. Between them they carry the address, the groundbreaking, the open house window and its attendance, the dedication dates and the dedicating figure, the floor area, the site acreage, the exterior material, the room counts and the position in the Utah sequence. Where they agree, this page states the fact. Where they disagree, which is on the announcement date alone, it states both.
What neither carries is anything about visiting. No grounds hours, no parking capacity, no statement about whether the grounds are open to people not attending, and no visitors centre. Several secondary listings fill that gap with confident detail and none of it could be traced back to an issuer, which is exactly the shape of a fact that is about to be wrong. So this companion leaves it blank and says so, which is less satisfying and more useful.
One further gap is worth naming. No architect is recorded in the almanac entry. Names circulate in secondary indexes, and attributing a 104,000 square foot building to somebody on the strength of an unsourced index is not a small error, so nothing is printed here. The same discipline governs the 1990s siting question: contemporaneous news coverage was not retrievable, it would have to be handled as a land use and traffic story if it were, and a page that cannot do it properly should not gesture at it.
Asked most often
Can you visit the Bountiful Temple grounds, and where do you park?
Checked 15 August 2026, and the honest answer is that nothing about either is published.
No issuer page states public grounds hours, whether the grounds are open, how much parking exists or whether there is a visitors centre. That is a genuine gap rather than a hedge, and the responsible thing is to say so rather than to repeat what a listing site has assumed. What can be said is that the grounds front Bountiful Boulevard at 640 South and that the exterior and the hillside setting are visible from the public road, which is how most people in this county have always experienced the building.
There was one period when the interior was open to anybody: the public open house from 5 November to 17 December 1994, before the dedication in January 1995, which drew 870,361 people over six weeks. That was a specific, dated, one time arrangement rather than a standing one, and it is in the record because the almanac put it there.
For anything current, the institution that runs the building is the only source worth using. A guide that invented grounds hours would be doing the reader real harm, because a wasted drive up the bench is the least of what a wrong answer on this subject costs. This page carries the architecture, the materials, the dimensions, the dates and the siting, and stops exactly where the published record stops.
Why this page is written the way it is
Fair housing law governs how a real estate site may write about a place of worship, and the line is clean: describe the building and never the people. So this page carries granite, floor area, acreage, room counts, dates and a hillside, and carries nothing at all about who attends, how many attend, what anybody believes or what any of it might say about a street. That is not squeamishness. It is the rule, and it happens to produce a better page about a building than the alternative does.
Living with it
The bench above the temple is the built edge of this city.
The nine acres this building stands on sit at the top of where Bountiful was allowed to go. Above and around it the streets thin out and then stop, the national forest starts, and two of the city's three canyon mouths open within a couple of miles. That gives the upper bench a hard edge that most Wasatch Front suburbs do not have, and it is the reason the streets up here have views that cannot be built out from underneath them.
It also puts them at the top of every gradient in this city, and those gradients are measurable rather than atmospheric. The city bills water at a higher rate at high elevation than at low. The bench holds snow the valley floor gauge does not record. Driveways are steeper and retaining walls are part of what a house is. And since December 2025 a mapped local wildland urban interface area has governed what new construction, major remodels and re-roofing on the mapped ground have to meet.
None of that is a warning and all of it is a set of facts a person should have before they fall for a summer showing. The city publishes an interactive map on which a specific address can be checked against the wildland layer directly, which is the right way to handle it. The mover page carries the whole set, and the trailhead a few hundred yards south of this building has its own page.
Across the road
Holbrook Canyon
The trailhead people find by using this building as the landmark, with a county warning on the trail beyond it.
Read the guideThe other landmark
Main Street and the Square
The 1863 adobe building at Main and Center, the plaza, the bronzes and the museum, four blocks and a century apart.
Read the guideThe priced side
The Bountiful city guide
What a bench address actually costs: prices, taxes, utilities, school assignment and the inspection list on older stock.
Open the guideKeep reading
More of Bountiful on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
Eight addresses, six of them free, and three of them end at a canyon mouth.
Read the guideThe busy trailhead
Mueller Park
Gates at seven, dirt bikes allowed, and a race that climbs 6,084 feet in 15 miles.
Read the guideThe quiet one
Holbrook Canyon
The county calls it hard to follow, and the wheels may be about to lose it.
Read the guideTwo days in July
Handcart Days
24 and 25 July, 1.8 miles up Main, and no chairs out before Friday at nine.
Read the guideDowntown
Main Street and the Square
A 520 foot ice ribbon on a school footprint, six bronze bees, a QR code trail.
Read the guideMoving here
A city that runs itself
Municipal power, municipal fiber, a residents only dump, water priced by height.
Read the guideThe companion
Bountiful, in full
The bench above it, the square below it, and the utility company that is also City Hall.
Read the pageQuick answers
The temple, answered.
At 640 South Bountiful Boulevard, on the upper east bench above the Bountiful city grid, several hundred feet higher than the 4,771 foot city datum. The site is nine acres and the grounds front the boulevard. Because of where it sits and what it is faced in, the building is visible from I-15 and from a large part of south Davis County, which is why it functions as the landmark people give directions by on this side of the county, including directions to the Holbrook Canyon trailhead just south of it.
The published total floor area is 104,000 square feet, on a nine acre site. The exterior is finished in Bethel white granite, which is the material named by the church's own newsroom. The almanac record for the building gives four ordinance rooms and eight sealing rooms alongside a baptistry and a celestial room. It was the eighth temple built in Utah and the first in Davis County, and those figures are the building's own rather than anybody's estimate.
Ground was broken on 2 May 1992 and it was dedicated across a week in January 1995, from the 8th to the 14th, by Howard W. Hunter. Both issuer sources agree on those dates. The announcement date is the one point where they do not: the church newsroom article gives 28 May 1988 and the Church News almanac gives 2 February 1990, and nothing found reconciles them, so this page names both rather than choosing.
870,361, over a public open house that ran from 5 November to 17 December 1994, ahead of the dedication the following January. For scale, the city the building stands above counted 45,762 residents at the 2020 decennial census. It is the strongest single number in the published record for this building and it comes from the Church News almanac. The dedication that followed ran to twenty eight sessions and was at the time the most attended temple dedication there had been.
Nothing about that is published on any issuer page checked on 15 August 2026: no grounds hours, no statement about whether the grounds are open, no parking capacity and no visitors centre. That is a real gap rather than a hedge, and this page does not fill it with a guess. What can be said is that the grounds front Bountiful Boulevard at 640 South and that the exterior and the hillside setting are visible from the public road. For anything current, ask the institution that runs the building.
Bethel white granite on the exterior, which is the material the church newsroom names for the 104,000 square foot building, and the almanac agrees. Bethel white granite is widely understood to be quarried outside Utah, but no issuer page checked states the quarry location, so this page does not either. The contrast with the city's other architectural landmark is sharp: the Bountiful Tabernacle downtown is built of adobe with roof timbers pegged together and lumber that came out of Holbrook Canyon.
No architect is named in the Church News almanac record for the building, and none could be confirmed at an issuer. Names do circulate in secondary architectural indexes. Attributing a building of this size to somebody on the strength of an unsourced index is not a small error, so this page prints no architect at all. If the attribution matters to you, the institution that commissioned the building is the place to settle it rather than a directory.
Yes. The almanac record gives it as the eighth temple built in Utah and the first in Davis County, dedicated in January 1995. Two more have since been dedicated in the county, at Layton in June 2024 and at Syracuse in June 2025, which makes the Bountiful building the oldest of the three by roughly three decades and the only one that predates the county's current shape of growth.
Because of where it was put rather than how tall it is. A nine acre site on the upper east bench sits several hundred feet above the valley floor, so a white granite building on it reads against a dark hillside from a long way off, including from the freeway and from most of south Davis County. That is a landscape and wayfinding fact and it is the practical reason the building turns up in ordinary directions on this side of the county, including as the landmark for a canyon trailhead a few hundred yards south of it.
A landmark on the bench, and a bench that prices itself differently.
The streets around this building sit at the top of every gradient in Bountiful, and the gradients are measurable: a water meter billed at the high elevation rate rather than the low one, snow the valley floor gauge does not record, a driveway to clear in January, retaining walls that belong on an inspection list, and ground inside the local wildland map the city adopted in December 2025 that reaches a future roof replacement. Every one is checkable against a specific address on the city's own interactive map before an offer. Send me the streets and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works south Davis, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.