It started with a dog named Chase.
Every product has an origin story. Ours has four legs. The Chase Hinge System is named after the dog who caused the problem it was built to solve, and this is how a dog who wouldn’t stay put turned into a patent-pending invention.
Patent-pending U.S. technology (US 2025 / 0376883 A1) · Engineered by AA INTEGRA · One SKU, easy to stock
Chase just wanted to be where the work was.
Aram Stepanian was out in his garage, working, and his dog Chase wanted to be right there with him. Like always. That left two options, and he hated both. Close the door, and the garage turned into a hot, dark, dust-filled box. Open the door, and Chase was one squirrel away from the driveway.
So he did what everyone does. He propped the door open on a board. Cracked it a foot off the ground. It never sat right: not the airflow, not the safety, and not the nagging feeling that this was one bad second away from a very bad day. One open gate, one fast squirrel, and Chase would be gone.
AA INTEGRA builds infrastructure: underground power vaults, modular roundabouts, structures for places where “close enough” gets people hurt. So when he looked at that half-propped door, he didn’t just see an annoyance. He saw an unsolved problem that had been sitting in millions of garages for a hundred years, and nobody had bothered to fix.
So he fixed it. He designed a set of lockable hinges that finally gave a garage door a setting it had never had: open at the top for light and air, locked at the bottom as a solid barrier. Chase got his sunshine and his spot by the workbench. He also stayed exactly where he was supposed to.
Then we named the whole thing after him.
That’s why it’s the Chase Hinge System. It was built to keep one good dog safely inside, and it turned out millions of people needed the same thing.
Not a startup with a clever idea. An engineering firm doing what it's always done.
CHS comes from AA INTEGRA LLC, a Nevada engineering and design company led by founder Aram Stepanian. For years, AA INTEGRA has designed and patented practical solutions across the kind of fields where a design that “mostly works” is not an option: power distribution, underground infrastructure, workforce and emergency housing, and large-scale resort and civic projects.
Aram has spent his career designing for how people actually live, not how a drawing assumes they will: sustainable villages, workforce housing, rapid-deployment shelter, master-planned resorts. The same lens turned, one afternoon, onto the most overlooked room in the ordinary home, because of a dog named Chase.
The track record behind the hinge:
Voltek — Underground vault replacement — Granted (U.S. 8,413,404 and 8,307,604)
Spider — Modular mini-roundabout — Application
U Power — Modular underground power distribution — Application
Sentinel — Underground vault conditioning and monitoring — Application
Structa — Underground structures — Application
The Chase Hinge System — A secure, partly-open garage door — Patent-pending (U.S. App. US 2025/0376883 A1)
The company’s own two rules, in its own words: solve complicated problems with “practical, efficient and beautiful solutions,” and remember that “necessity is the mother of all inventions.” CHS is both at once. The founder had the problem, standing in his own garage with his dog. Nothing solved it. So he built the thing that did.
CHS is AA INTEGRA’s first product for the home. The engineering standard is the same one the company has applied at infrastructure scale. When you install it, you’re installing real engineering, not a repackaged bracket.
A garage door should serve you. Not the other way around.
Your garage is part of your home. You paid for it. You should be able to use it for work, for play, for pets, for living, without a door dictating the terms. The door should adapt to your life.
That belief is the whole reason CHS exists, and it's the standard we hold it to: it has to be practical (it works with the door you already own) and simple (you install it in an afternoon).
That belief is the whole reason CHS exists, and it's the standard we hold it to: it has to be practical (it works with the door you already own) and simple (you install it in an afternoon).
Solve complicated problems with practical, efficient and beautiful solutions. Necessity is the mother of all inventions.
CHS comes from AA INTEGRA LLC, led by founder Aram Stepanian. For years, AA INTEGRA has designed and patented practical solutions across power distribution, underground infrastructure, workforce housing, and large-scale civic projects — the kind of fields where a design that mostly works is not an option.
CHS is AA INTEGRA’s first product for the home. The engineering standard is the same one the company has applied at infrastructure scale. When you install it, you’re installing real engineering, not a repackaged bracket.
Light & Air
You'd love to use the garage as flex space with the kids around. A wide-open door to the driveway makes that a non-starter.
Locked Solid
Need the dog contained but the garage ventilated. You want the dog nearby while you work, but the second the door's up, they're gone.
Workshop Ready
Sanding, painting, cutting, wrenching — all of it wants ventilation and light, and none of it is safe with the door wide open to the street.
