Question 1

What is Lekua?

Accepted Answer

Lekua is a web application that turns a California street address into a layered CAD base plan and a pre-design site analysis for landscape architects and designers. It reads the county’s own GIS records, national elevation and structure data, soil surveys, and fire-hazard maps — the existing-conditions work that otherwise takes a half-day across county GIS portals and hand-tracing into CAD.

Question 2

What does “Lekua” mean?

Accepted Answer

Lekua is Basque for “the place”, pronounced LEH-koo-ah. The software is being built in California and Basque Country. The name describes the product: every answer Lekua gives is about one specific place — its grade, its soil, its light, what has grown there historically — setting each project up for ecological success from the ground up.

Question 3

What does Lekua make?

Accepted Answer

Two files. A layered DXF, written to the DXF 2000 interchange standard so it opens natively in AutoCAD, Vectorworks, and SketchUp Pro: property lines with bearings and distances, 1–2 ft contours on most lots (coarser only where relief demands it — the sheet states the interval drawn), building footprints with measured heights where the county records them, spot elevations, slope bands, tree canopy, buried utilities where the county’s public-works GIS maps them, CAL FIRE defensible-space zones, and a setback envelope where the jurisdiction’s table has passed review — layers named to the U.S. National CAD Standard. And a PDF site report: a surveyor-style existing-conditions sheet, seasonal sun studies, the soil and climate pages, and a photo plant palette — one sheet per planting zone where the zones earn it — every figure cited to its source.

Question 4

Where does Lekua work?

Accepted Answer

All 58 California counties. Every county has a GIS provider wired, so any California address returns a parcel boundary, contours, footprints, fire zones, soil, sun, and a site-matched native palette. What differs county to county is how much comes from the county’s own records rather than statewide sources — and the sheet always names which.

Question 5

What will Lekua not claim?

Accepted Answer

The plans built on this work go out under someone’s name — sometimes a stamp and a license, always a reputation — so Lekua is built to be wrong out loud rather than confident and quiet. Encoded is not drawn: a jurisdiction’s setback table is transcribed from its adopted code with the citation attached, and the envelope is only drawn on the plan after that table passes an independent review. Where review is pending, the sheet still carries the transcribed table and its citation — the envelope just isn’t drawn — and the coverage pages list every city’s status. A missing answer is said, not filled in: where no source carries a height for a structure, the sheet prints a no-data note instead of a plausible number — and a height read from a model rather than a county record is cited as modeled. And every figure names its source and its tolerance — property lines ±5–15 ft, elevations ±1 ft on NAVD 88, footprints ±5–10 ft. This is planning-level work — mapping-grade, not survey-grade — for pre-design and concept; construction staking and boundary determinations belong to a licensed land surveyor, and the sheet says so.

Question 6

Where does the data come from?

Accepted Answer

Nothing here is traced by hand, and nothing is estimated by a model and presented as a record. The site layers — the county’s own GIS, the USGS 3DEP elevation model, CAL FIRE hazard zones, USDA-NRCS soil surveys, and Open-Meteo climate — are queried live at the moment you enter an address. The plant layers — Calscape and CNPS for the native palette, Cal-IPC for invasives — are maintained copies of those inventories. And live means fetched when you search: each figure also carries its record’s date, because a county layer is only as current as its last update — recent construction may not be on it yet. The full schedule is below.

Question 7

Is Lekua a CAD program or a rendering tool?

Accepted Answer

Neither. Lekua produces the documentation a designer needs before they start drawing, and hands it to the tools they already use — the DXF opens in AutoCAD, Vectorworks, and SketchUp Pro. It does not draw the design, and it does not render it.

Question 8

Who is Lekua for?

Accepted Answer

Licensed landscape architects, landscape designers, design-build firms, and garden designers working on California sites — particularly anyone who needs a fast base plan, MWELO compliance documentation, fire-safe planting for a WUI parcel, a client-ready site report, or a pre-submittal check of a planting plan they already have.

Question 9

Can Lekua check a planting plan I already have?

Accepted Answer

Yes — that is plan check, and it works the other direction from site analysis. Drop in a planting plan as PDF, DWG, DXF, CSV, or a photo of a printed sheet, and it flags Cal-IPC invasives and fire-risk species with California native substitutions, notes known toxicity to people, dogs, cats, and horses where a plant has been assessed, computes the MWELO water budget (MAWA/ETWU), and produces the Water Efficient Landscape Worksheet for the Landscape Documentation Package.

Question 10

What does Lekua cost?

Accepted Answer

Searching and analyzing a site is free, and needs no account. Exports are generated from the same analysis you already see on screen, and require an account.

Question 11

Who makes Lekua, and how do I get in touch?

Accepted Answer

Lekua is built and operated by LoveCRM. It is a working product, not a research demo: the exports it produces are used on live residential and commercial landscape projects in California. For questions, corrections to a county’s data, or a jurisdiction you want encoded next, email hello@lekua.design.

Lekua