A house of recliners, recovered together
A recliner is three shapes wearing one cover.
Movie theater seat reupholstery in NYC. A cinema seat does not hold still the way a fixed house seat does, so the cover that goes on it has to work in more than the position it was signed off in.
What one cover has to do
Every position puts the strain somewhere else.
A sample is approved on a seat standing still. The seat then spends its working life moving between these three.
Upright
The seat as the house sees it with the lights up, and the only position anyone judges a sample in. Colour and grain get signed off here, which is the easiest part of the job to get right.
Reclined
The back tips and the joint between back and seat opens. The cover has to give at that line and come back to shape, so the material has to stretch and recover rather than simply hold still.
Legrest out
A panel that was folded away underneath is now facing the screen for the length of the film. It is the surface an audience looks at longest and the one a specification written from a closed seat never mentions. Makers like Irwin Seating build that run as one continuous seat-to-footrest panel, replaceable on its own, which is the shape a cover has to be cut in.
Before the covers are ordered
The seat under the cover has its own clock.
A new cover on a tired mechanism is money spent twice. Where only part of a house has gone, the answer is seat by seat instead.
Stripped down, a seat shows what a walkthrough cannot: what the padding has left in it, and whether the arm between two seats is further gone than either of them. A house booked as one bulk project fixes that specification once and holds it across every block.
How a moving seat is actually covered
The fit is checked open, not closed.
Three moves, and the first and last are the same action. That repetition is the method, not an oversight.
Run the seat through its range first
Before anything is cut, a seat is opened and closed by hand so the places the old cover is pulling show themselves. A worn seat tells you where the next one will wear, and that is the part a photograph cannot give us.
Cut the panels the travel needs
Panels that sit across a moving joint are cut with the travel allowed for, and the legrest front is treated as a face rather than an underside. Getting that one panel wrong is the difference an audience sees.
Cycle it again before it goes back
A cover that fits a closed seat and binds an open one is not finished. Each seat is run through its range again on the riser it will live on, because that is the only place the fit is real.
None of this applies to a live house of fixed seats, where the seat has one shape and the argument is a different one entirely.
Before a house is committed
What cinema operators ask us.
Do the mechanisms have to come apart to recover the seats?
Not usually taken apart, but they do have to be worked around. A powered seat carries its drive and its wiring inside the frame, so covers come off and go back on with those left connected and protected rather than stripped out. It is the reason a recliner house takes longer per seat than a house of fixed seats, and it is also the opportunity: while the cover is off, the moving parts are the cheapest they will ever be to look at, so anything failing gets reported before it is closed up.
Our seats are vinyl. Is leather the upgrade, or a mistake?
It depends on what the house sells rather than on which is better. A coated cover is chosen because it wipes down and shrugs off what gets carried into an auditorium; a finished hide is chosen because a premium room is being sold on how the seat feels under a hand. Both work on a recliner and both are specified for them. What matters more than the choice is that whichever one goes on is specified with the movement in mind, because a cover that cannot flex fails at the joint regardless of what it is made of.
Do the consoles and cup-holder arms get done at the same time?
They should, and they are quoted that way unless you ask otherwise. The arm between two seats takes the drinks, the food and every hand going in and out of the row, so it wears on its own schedule rather than the seat's. Recovering the seats and leaving the arms is the one shortcut that shows from the aisle, because the two surfaces are touching and the eye reads them together.
Start with one auditorium
Tell us which house comes out first.
The seat make, what is on it now and how many screens are going the same way is enough to start. Or call (347) 310-7483.
