Aexion Quantum Limited was founded by Donal O'Keeffe and Micheal King to do one thing well: hold a single, accountable contract with the client, and run the design and delivery team underneath it as one coordinated entity rather than five separately appointed consultants.
When architects, designers, engineers, fire consultants, quantity surveyors and others work separately on a construction project, individual goals usually trump overall project objectives.
The result is the pattern most clients know too well: missing information, poorly communicated information, inconsistencies between documentation, poor resource allocation, decisions made on inadequate inputs, and remedial works late in the programme to absorb the consequences. These difficulties have become more prevalent as buildings have become more technical, the range of products and materials has increased, and fire and safety standards have become stricter.
AexionQ was established to take that pattern off the client's desk. The firm itself is not the architect, the engineer, the QS or the fire consultant — it is the corporate entity that holds those specialists together as one design team, and is accountable to the client for the result.
AexionQ was set up on five explicit operating principles. They are written into how the firm is structured, how the consortium is contracted, and how every project is run.
We reject linear planning and design processes that lead to inefficient solutions, and have adopted an iterative system that considers the continuous interactions between different sectors.
We emphasise the connections between the disciplines and improve communication between professionals and stakeholders throughout the duration of the project.
We take decisions jointly with all participants — not sequentially down a chain of separately appointed consultants.
We invest more time and energy in the initial design phase — to achieve better coordination of the subsequent phases.
We bring budget control and engineering valuation into the earliest design stages — giving the client clear options on the cost impact of each design decision before it is taken, and minimising the risk of delay, change and cost overrun later.
Aexion Quantum Limited is fully insured for integrated design team services through its international insurance brokers, AON, with its underwriters Liberty and Allianz.
This matters because it allows a single contract to be written with the client — and a single accountable entity to stand behind the work of the consortium, rather than a stack of separate professional indemnity policies that can disagree at the wrong moment.
Insurance certification is available on request from the office.
Donal O'Keeffe — Founder & Managing Director. Senior fire engineer of more than thirty years' standing; also Managing Director of FCC Fire Cert Ltd, the long-standing fire safety practice that sits within the consortium. Donal acts as the project's framework manager and senior point of contact with the contracting authority.
Micheal King — Co-founder & Director. More than twenty years in senior management of construction and service-management businesses, with a track record of delivering large-scale projects on time and on budget across manufacturing, technology, residential infrastructure and healthcare in Ireland and internationally. Micheal leads design team coordination and contract administration.
Full profiles are on the Team & Consortium page, together with the principal contacts at each of the five consortium firms.
Every commission, regardless of size, runs through the same five-stage process. The deliverables and depth scale with the brief; the gates do not.
| Stage 1 | Preliminary review & survey Brief, constraints register, full survey of the existing situation, infection-control / RAMS where applicable, agreement of methodology with the client before design commences. |
|---|---|
| Stage 2 | Design All consortium disciplines designing concurrently — architecture, M&E, structural, fire and life safety, QS — in iterative working sessions, not sequential hand-offs. |
| Stage 3 | Procurement & tender Bill of quantities, preliminary H&S plan, contract preparation and issue, evaluation of returns and recommendation to the client. GCCC alignment as required. |
| Stage 4 | Installation & supervision Pre-construction methodology, inspection plan, regular site attendance, RFIs, soft starts, progress reporting, performance-based payment certificates. |
| Stage 5 | Certification & handover Design, installation and final commissioning certificates, record of variations, O&M manuals, training records, opinion on compliance, handover pack to a standard the certifier of compliance can accept. |
The consortium is open: additional specialist firms are brought in when a brief calls for them. The sectors in which our partner firms have repeat, current experience include:
Acute campuses, maternity, paediatric, nursing homes. Continuous-occupation upgrading a specialism.
Primary, secondary and third level. Department of Education programmes.
Office, retail and mixed-use developments at every scale.
Apartment, build-to-rent and social schemes.
Protected structures and listed buildings, with conservation-architect involvement.
Manufacturing, logistics, rapid-response builds.
Hotels, licensed premises and hospitality venues.
Site-wide strategies coordinated before individual buildings are designed.