Topographic Surveys in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont is a small enclave city surrounded by Oakland, and nearly every project in it passes through strict design review. That process runs on accurate site information: existing contours, tree locations and canopies, retaining walls, terraces, and the relationship between a proposed addition and its neighbors. The housing stock — older estate homes on hillside lots — makes that information genuinely hard to gather by conventional means. Mature landscaping and specimen trees interrupt sight lines everywhere, terraced gardens hide grade changes behind hedges and walls, and a total-station crew can spend days chasing line-of-sight for a few hundred shots that still miss the feature the architect asks about later.

This is precisely the environment our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner was made for. From multiple compact setups we capture the entire property — millions of points — in a single visit, then filter vegetation in processing to extract a bare-earth ground model beneath the canopy that no conventional topo could economically produce. The same cloud records every wall, walk, terrace, trunk location, and roofline, so the site plan submitted to design review reflects the property as it actually exists, and the drip lines and tree trunks that Piedmont's review process cares about are measured rather than estimated. Deliverables include 1-foot contours, spot elevations, a DTM, tree location mapping, and a layered DWG/DXF base map; the point cloud itself is available to architects who want to model the existing house and grounds in context. When design questions evolve mid-project — they usually do in Piedmont — the answers are already in the data.

Piedmont records and survey filings are handled by the Alameda County Recorder and the Alameda County Surveyor. Where an addition also needs the existing residence documented, our as-built surveys produce floor plans and elevations from the same scan.