There is a specific kind of appointment that happens at Famosa Tile — the kind where a designer has already told their client a little about the showroom, the client has said yes to coming in mostly to humor the schedule, and then something shifts about thirty seconds after they walk through the door.
That shift is reliable enough that Vanessa Becking and Angela see it almost every week. A client who came in certain touches a raked tile profile for the first time, steps back to look at a full-scale terracotta installation in the showroom’s working kitchen, and changes their mind about what they thought they wanted.
“The clients who are most convinced before they come in are often the most surprised by the time they leave. They come in wanting white subway tile and leave talking about forest green Zellige. Not because I talked them into anything — because they saw the difference themselves.”
— Vanessa Becking, Managing Partner
The thing that makes the Famosa visit different is not the inventory, though the inventory is exceptional. It is the environment in which that inventory exists.
A Showroom Built to Change Decisions
Most tile showrooms are organized around product display: samples pinned to walls, materials grouped by color family, a logic that makes restocking easy and browsing predictable. Famosa was designed differently from its first day — around the idea that a material cannot be properly evaluated until it is seen in the context it will actually live in.
The kitchen in the Famosa showroom functions. The showers function. The bath environments are fully operational. The bar — complete with beer on tap — is there because Josiah believed from the beginning that a showroom visit should feel like something other than a transaction.
“I wanted the opposite of a tile store. Not a supply house — an experience. Somewhere you would actually want to spend time with your client. Somewhere that did the work of showing them the material instead of asking them to imagine it.”
— Josiah Lilly, Founder
For designers, this environment changes the client conversation in a specific and valuable way. The uncertainty that lives in the gap between a 4-inch sample card and a finished 60-square-foot installation — the uncertainty that produces the most difficult conversations later — collapses when the client can stand in front of the actual material, at actual scale, and see it respond to actual light.
What the Best Appointments Look Like
The designers who get the most from a Famosa visit tend to arrive having done one thing: thought through the application before they walked in the door. Not the material — the application. Which surfaces need to be addressed. What the light conditions are in the actual space. Whether the client is committed to a maintenance protocol or needs something more forgiving.
With that context, Vanessa and Angela can narrow the entire collection to three or four materials that will actually work for the project — and then let the showroom do the rest. The client touches them, walks around them, watches what happens as the light shifts across the showroom. By the time a decision is made, it has been made from direct experience with the material in a real environment, not from a catalog image and an optimistic imagination.
“Our best appointments are the ones where the client comes in skeptical and leaves certain. Not certain about what we told them — certain about what they saw themselves. That is a completely different kind of confidence going into a project.”
— Angela, Famosa Tile
The Relationship That Continues After the Visit
For designers who work with Famosa regularly, the showroom visit is the start of a longer relationship, not a one-time transaction. Vanessa and Angela track what designers have specified before, what their aesthetic tends toward, and what their clients have responded to. When new arrivals come in — Famosa receives new samples every two weeks from producers across Morocco, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Mexico — the team reaches out to designers whose projects would be a natural fit.
That ongoing attention is what the best designer relationships at Famosa are built on. Not a single visit, but a resource that keeps evolving alongside the designer’s work.
Private design appointments are available for designers who want to bring a client in for a focused material review session. Vanessa and Angela are available to discuss project-specific requirements in advance of the visit.
| Famosa Tile is Orange County’s most distinctive tile and stone showroom, located in Costa Mesa. Visit famosatile.com or follow @famosatile. |
Meta title: The Famosa Visit — How the Best Designer-Client Projects Start
Meta description: The most successful tile and stone specifications in Orange County share a common starting point: a visit to Famosa Tile’s Costa Mesa showroom. Here is what that experience looks like and why it changes the project.
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