2025 Mountain States Best Projects
Award of Merit, Office/Retail/Mixed-Use, Excellence in Safety: Grand Hyatt Deer Valley

Grand Hyatt Deer Valley
Park City, Utah
EXCELLENCE IN SAFETY and Award of Merit, Office/Retail/Mixed-Use
Submitted by Jacobsen Construction
Owner Extell Development Co.
Lead Design Firm OZ Architecture
General Contractor Jacobsen Construction
Civil & Structural Engineer Dunn Associates
MEP Engineer CCI Mechanical
Electrical Engineer & Contractor Hunt Electric
The centerpiece of Deer Valley East Village is a 642,095-sq-ft luxury resort that includes hotel rooms, private condos, ballrooms, bars, restaurants and retail spaces.
The project was built on a mountainside with a web of tunnels below the surface that once belonged to a mine. Since not all mining voids were included in historical records, the building was engineered to use a foundation system that could span potentially unknown voids deep below ground. Hidden from view, the parking structure doubles as the foundation, engineered to hold up the mountainside as it extends deep below the main entrance.
To build this way, crews made a 40-ft-deep cut uphill on the mountainside. The cut was shored with shotcrete and pins, and the foundation walls were constructed tight to this wall with blind-side waterproofing and structured buttresses.
Across more than 150,000 work hours, with about 400 people on site at peak periods, the project team had no lost-time incidents and an OSHA recordable rate of 1.29. Special attention was given to crane loads, with crews strictly following all delivery protocols and constantly using horns to alert everyone to the work being done with that equipment. Project leadership was extremely strict about properly tying off and properly utilizing toe boards when working at heights. Jobsite-specific safety orientations, periodic jobsite-wide safety stand-downs and both regular and impromptu safety inspections were key to safety messaging.


