The new Latter Day Saints Temple in Langley marks the seventh temple of its kind built in Canada, and the first for the province of British Columbia.

The two-story temple is a private monument and meeting place for qualified Mormons for weddings, funerals and baptisms. Inside, it is divided amongst four main rooms: two endowment rooms and two sealing rooms.

The endowment room is akin to a small theater with 30 to 60 seats, depending upon the temple, and often has an isle down the middle. Rituals in these rooms are designed to prepare participants to become kings, queens, priests and priestesses in the afterlife.

Each Mormon temple also requires a sealing room, dominated by a large altar with surrounding chairs and sofas, which is used for weddings. Walls are required to be of a light tint, and two of the walls require large facing mirrors.

On the outside, the temple is clad in Branco Siena granite from Brazil and is surrounded by a colorful landscape and a public walkway.

Raicor Contracting performed much of the high-end finishing work for the walls, ceiling and glass-fiber-reinforced moldings. The company also built interior partitions and ceilings for the concrete temple. Speciality plaster moldings for the project came from Eastern Canada.

Construction of a private monument such as the Mormon temple came with a unique set of considerations, particularly the owner’s description that called for drywall finishes to appear like polished marble.

Judge’s comment: “In this day and age it is rare that our industry gets to demonstrate the full capability of our phenomenal finishing trades. The temple provided such an opportunity for Raicor Contractors and they have succeeded in making a statement worthy of our recognition, capturing the reverence required by the owners of this beautiful building.”