Who we are
Alares is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, founded in 2007 by Don Maggioli, a West Point graduate and former Green Beret officer. We are architects, engineers, commissioning agents and owner's representatives, working out of Quincy, Massachusetts and Sarasota, Florida.
Where we work
Look at the last few years of our project list and it reads like a tour of the VA system. Boiler plant replacement at Albany. Chilled water distribution at Asheville. Fire alarm upgrades across 27 buildings at Bedford. A mental health ward renovation at Brockton. Seismic evaluations in Reno and across 45 buildings in California. Cooling tower commissioning in Dallas. Land due diligence for national cemeteries in Oregon, Illinois, Maine and Wisconsin.
That is not an accident of business development. It is a deliberate specialization, and it compounds. The federal design standards, the VA handbooks, the infection control requirements, the phasing constraints of a hospital that never closes, all of it is knowledge you only get by doing it repeatedly.
Why the overlap matters
A veteran owned firm working almost exclusively on veterans' facilities creates a short line between the people doing the work and the people using the building. When we phase a renovation so a ward stays open, or catch a control sequence that would have run a plant wrong for years, the person on the other end of that decision is not a line item.
It also shapes how we behave on a project. Investigate before designing, because a wrong assumption becomes someone's disrupted care. Decide in the field when the field demands it, because delay on a live campus has a cost. Verify what got built, because nobody should inherit a problem they cannot see.
The short version
Veterans built this firm. Veterans use these buildings. Everything else in how we work follows from that.