Design-Build · Southern California & Silicon Valley
At Tech LA Builder, the architect, the structural engineer, and the builder are the same people. The home we draw is the home we permit — and the home we hand you the keys to.
The Design-Build Difference
Most homes change hands half a dozen times before ground is broken — architect to engineer, engineer to drafter, drafter to a permit runner, and finally to a builder seeing the plans for the first time. Every hand-off is where budgets leak, details get lost, and fingers start pointing. We removed the hand-offs.
Massing, floor plans, and elevations shaped around your lot, your light, and your city's zoning code.
Kitchens, baths, and millwork designed with the floor plan — not decorated onto it afterward.
Foundations and framing calculated and stamped in-house by our own licensed PE.
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing routed as one coordinated set, Title 24 included.
We submit, answer corrections, and pull the permit ourselves — in the cities we work in every week.
Our licensed GC crews build the exact set we drew, with the engineer of record walking the site.
When the person who stamps your structural drawings is the person who frames your walls, nothing gets lost in translation — and there is exactly one phone number to call when you have a question.
Selected Work
From our own portfolio — hillside residences, custom homes, and remodels designed, engineered, permitted, and built by our in-house team across Southern California and Silicon Valley.
What We Do
Six services that normally mean six contracts, six schedules, and six people to chase. Here they share one office, one drawing set, and one accountable lead — so a change in the kitchen is checked against the structure the same day, not discovered on site.
Site analysis, concept massing, floor plans, elevations, and complete construction documents — designed against your city's zoning, setbacks, and height limits from the first sketch, so the plan that gets approved is the plan you fell in love with.
Kitchen and bath layouts, custom millwork, lighting plans, and finish schedules specified down to the cabinet pull — with real material pricing on the table before selections are locked, not after.
Foundations, framing, shear walls, steel, and retaining walls calculated and stamped in-house by a licensed California PE — including hillside lots, expansive soils, and seismic retrofits that make other firms bring in an outside engineer.
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing designed as one coordinated set with Title 24 energy calculations — duct runs, panel loads, and pipe slopes resolved on paper, so nothing collides in the ceiling on installation day.
Detached ADUs, garage conversions, and second-story additions planned around California's ADU laws and your lot's real constraints — setbacks, utility capacity, septic or sewer, and the fastest legal path through your city's counter.
Our own licensed GC team builds the set we drew: demolition, foundation, framing, and finishes under one contract and one schedule — with the engineer of record on site at every structural milestone, not on the phone.
How a Project Runs
We walk the site, pull the zoning and permit history, and tell you plainly what your lot allows, what it will fight, and what it should cost — before any design fee.
Concept floor plans and massing studies you can react to, with a rough construction range attached to each direction — so taste and budget get decided together.
The chosen concept becomes a real building: interiors selected, structure sized, systems routed. You approve drawings that an engineer has already stood behind.
Full construction documents, submitted by us. When the city sends corrections, the people who drew the plans answer them — no relay race, no re-explaining your project.
Permit in hand, our crews build it. Inspections are called by the same team that prepared for them, through final sign-off and the day we hand over the keys.
Where We Work
We keep our footprint deliberately tight: two California clusters where we know the plan-check counters, the local amendments, and the inspectors by name.
Los Angeles · Orange · Ventura · Santa Barbara · Riverside · San Bernardino
From the Santa Barbara coast across greater Los Angeles and Orange County, east to Palm Springs and south to San Juan Capistrano — new homes, remodels, and ADUs under one design-build contract.
Santa Clara · San Mateo · Southern Alameda
Peninsula and South Bay projects run by the same in-house team — hillside structural work, teardown rebuilds, and ADUs in some of California's most exacting permit jurisdictions.
The Person Behind the Stamp
Tech LA Builder is led by Shu Wu — a structural engineer by training who also holds the general contractor's license. He earned his master's in civil engineering at USC, and he still reviews every plan set that leaves the office and walks every structural pour his crews make.
That combination is the whole idea of the firm: drawings that already know how they'll be built, and a build that never has to guess what the drawings meant.
Start a Project
A free estimate starts with a conversation — what you want to build, where, and what the site will honestly allow. No pressure, no obligation; if we're not the right fit, we'll tell you who is.