Built Small. Built for the Road.
Built Small.
Built for the Road.
How Patrona Studio and Ultra-Mek engineered a full-function recliner for luxury transportation — and why the best furniture comes from people who know each other, trust each other, and share a passion for the craft.
A full recliner. In 29 inches.
Standard residential recliners are built for living rooms — generous floor plans, no weight constraints, no wall clearances dictated by a vehicle chassis. A typical recliner runs 33 to 36 inches wide and extends well past 36 inches when fully reclined.
Luxury coaches and high-end RVs don't have that luxury. A VIP coach slide-out might offer 28 to 30 inches of usable width per seating position. The floor must accommodate swivel bases and retention hardware. Weight matters for axle ratings. And the piece still needs to feel like a proper, premium recliner — not a compromise made for a confined space.
When Kathryn Moczulski began working with Nashville Coaches on their custom VIP builds, the brief was clear: deliver the recliner experience the client expected without exceeding the envelope the vehicle allowed. That meant going back to the frame — not adapting something that existed, but engineering something that didn't.
Two people who speak the same language.
The relationship between Kathryn Moczulski and Shane Hoffman, president of Ultra-Mek, didn't start with a purchase order. It started with a conversation — the kind that happens when two people who've spent their careers in furniture recognize that the person across the table thinks the way they do.
Shane grew up in the furniture industry. His father built frames. Shane learned at his side before eventually taking the reins of Ultra-Mek, a mechanism manufacturer based in Denton, North Carolina that has spent more than 40 years engineering the motion hardware that powers recliners across the residential, healthcare, and hospitality markets. The company holds over 70 U.S. patents. Every mechanism is tested to 50,000 cycles. The springs, rivets, steel, and casings are sourced and manufactured domestically. This is not a company that cuts corners.
Kathryn brought something different to the table — a designer's eye, a fabricator's understanding of material constraints, and a client base that pushed into territory Ultra-Mek hadn't previously served: luxury transportation. What she saw in Shane was a partner who understood that engineering and aesthetics aren't competing values. What Shane saw in Kathryn was someone who would hold the mechanism to the same standard she held the leather.
The best furniture comes from people who care about the same things — even when they're solving different parts of the problem. Shane understands that a mechanism isn't just hardware. It's the whole experience of how the piece feels to use, day after day, on the road.
— Kathryn Moczulski, Principal Designer, Patrona StudioDesigner and fabricator specializing in custom transportation interiors across luxury coaches, yachts, and private aircraft. Patrona Studio brings upholstery, millwork, and metalwork under one roof — eliminating the coordination overhead that fragmentary vendor models create.
Second-generation furniture frame designer and manufacturer. Shane grew up learning the trade from his father and has spent his career advancing motion hardware engineering at Ultra-Mek — a 40+ year North Carolina institution with over 70 patented mechanisms and a commitment to American-made production.
Decades of knowledge.
A fresh set of constraints.
Ultra-Mek's mechanism catalog is built on a simple principle: precision-engineered hardware that gives furniture makers the flexibility to bring any idea to life. The Series 7900MKLA was the mechanism selected for this application — a swivel-base recliner platform that could be dimensionally tuned for the transportation envelope while delivering full recline function.
The frame drawing tells the story plainly. Top view shows the swivel mechanism — the circular track and actuator assembly that allows the chair to rotate within its footprint. Side elevation reveals the full recline geometry: seat, back, legrest, and the mechanical linkage that sequences all three into a single smooth motion. The front view confirms what the client needed most — a finished width under 30 inches that could fit side-by-side in a coach slide-out without sacrificing armrest or seat width where the occupant actually feels it.
This is where Shane's second-generation knowledge matters in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. Knowing which tolerances are fixed and which are adjustable. Knowing how a smaller swivel base affects the chair's stability at road speed versus a stationary application. Knowing how to spec the mechanism so that Kathryn's upholstery team has the clearance they need at every seam and panel transition.
That knowledge doesn't live in a catalog. It lives in the conversations between people who've built thousands of chairs and understand intuitively where the engineering can flex — and where it cannot.
What the drawing shows
| Dimension | Value | Transportation Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Width | 29⅜" | Fits coach slide-out in paired configuration |
| Seat Width | 19⅞" | Full residential feel in a transportation footprint |
| Seat Height | 13¼" | Calibrated for coach floor height and entry clearance |
| Overall Height | 39⅛" | Clears overhead storage in most VIP coach configurations |
| Full Recline Depth | 36⅛" | Achieves full recline within standard slide-out depth |
| Seat Depth | 23" | Generous residential-feel seat in a compact frame |
From mechanism to finished chair.
The frame is the foundation. But what the client sees — and feels — is Patrona Studio's work: the leather selection, the panel proportions, the stitching detail, the way the back cushion sits against the headrest. The two chairs delivered to Nashville Coaches for their VIP build are finished in premium black leather with clean, minimal seaming and a swivel base in a dark powder coat that reads as intentional, not industrial.
Two form factors were developed for the same build: a higher-back chair with structured headrest for primary seating, and a slightly lower-back configuration for secondary positions where ceiling clearance is tighter. Both use the same 7900MKLA mechanism. Both are dimensionally coordinated to sit in the same vehicle without visual discontinuity.
That coordination — two chairs, one build, one set of eyes on the whole — is only possible when the designer and the mechanism partner have worked through the engineering together from the start.
The whole story
stays in one state.
There's something worth pausing on here: every meaningful part of this recliner was conceived, engineered, and built in North Carolina.
Ultra-Mek has been manufacturing in Denton, NC for over 40 years. The steel is American. The dies are built in-house on their own punch presses. The springs, rivets, casings, and bushings are domestic. The engineering team — the people who drafted the 7900MKLA frame drawing, ran it through prototype testing, put it through 50,000 cycles before it left the facility — work in Denton, about an hour from Patrona Studio's shop in Huntersville.
Patrona Studio is in Huntersville. The mechanisms come from Denton. The conversations between Kathryn and Shane happen in person, not across time zones or through a procurement portal. When a dimension needs to change or a new vehicle application comes in with a different envelope, the response time is measured in days, not months.
North Carolina has a long history of furniture manufacturing — a tradition that has contracted significantly over the past 30 years as production moved overseas. What Ultra-Mek and Patrona Studio represent, individually and together, is a commitment to keeping that knowledge alive: not as nostalgia, but as competitive advantage. American-made precision, second-generation expertise, and a designer who brings her transportation clients something that cannot be sourced from a catalog.
Over 70 patents. 50,000-cycle testing. Springs, steel, and casings made here. This is what American-made means when it isn't just a label — it's a standard.
— Ultra-Mek, Inc. · Denton, North CarolinaThe people behind the design
are the design.
When a luxury coach manufacturer or RV builder specifies a custom recliner through Patrona Studio, they're not buying a modified residential chair. They're buying the outcome of a collaborative engineering process between a designer who has built for transportation environments and a mechanism manufacturer whose second-generation knowledge goes back to when his father was drafting frames by hand.
The chair fits because the dimensions were worked out in conversation, not adapted from a standard spec. The mechanism performs because it was selected and configured for the specific demands of vehicle use — vibration, swivel retention, weight — not just for a living room. The leather looks right because the upholstery was designed around the frame, not applied to it.
That's what the partnership between Patrona Studio and Ultra-Mek makes possible. Not a product. A process — built on mutual respect, shared standards, and the kind of trust that comes from working alongside someone who cares about the same things you do.
All of it, from first conversation to finished chair, in North Carolina.
