On ABC7 for National Custom Framing Day
On September 15, 2026, National Custom Framing Day, ABC7 News brought Medi Bendanna, the owner of Best Framing in Costa Mesa, Orange County, into the studio for a live segment. Medi, who has spent the last 25 years framing the things people want to keep, brought pieces from the shop’s own displays and two framed surprises for the hosts.
Some pieces carry far more than a picture. Not long before the segment, a customer brought in a part from his father’s airplane, which had crashed in Alaska, recovered on a trip back to the site. The shop found a way to display it properly.
Presentation, preservation, or both
The first thing Medi works out with a customer is what the frame is for: presentation, preservation, or often both. Presentation is the design, the moulding, the mat and the size that make the piece look right in its room. Preservation is the materials, the side of the work called conservation framing. The store is completely acid-free, mats included, the piece is mounted so the work can be undone, and the glazing is chosen to keep daylight from fading it.
The four corners of a frame
Best Framing designs every piece around what the shop calls the four corners of a frame. First, the customer: who they are, and whether they have had anything framed before. Second, the piece: what it is and where it came from. Third, the place: where it is going to hang. Only then, the frame itself, chosen for that piece and that room. It is why the shop thinks of custom framing as a piece of furniture made for one home, not a standard size taken off a shelf.
A grandfather’s license plate
The first piece from the shop’s displays was a grandfather’s Alaska license plate, framed with a small engraved plaque beneath it. A piece like this is a way to honor someone, and it often goes to another member of the family as a gift. Objects with depth go into shadow boxes: a frame with a box behind it, deep enough that the glass never touches what is inside.
A grandmother’s recipe, oil marks included
Next came a grandmother’s handwritten recipe, framed together with a wooden spoon. A recipe book can be taken apart and shared this way, one recipe per frame, so the nephews, the cousins and everyone else keep a piece of her history and her favorite dishes. The oil marks stay, because they are part of the story. None of it has to be valuable; it only has to mean something to someone. Family paper goes onto acid-free mats and boards, so nothing behind the handwriting burns a brown line into it over the years.
Fight gloves, with the night they were worn
A pair of UFC fighting gloves, a gift from a friend of Medi’s, showed another habit of the shop: giving a small object a bigger story. Rather than a small frame for the gloves alone, Medi found a photograph from the event itself and framed the two together in a larger piece. The same thinking works for jerseys and other sports memorabilia, where a photograph, a ticket or a program can share the frame. Customers who come back a second or third time often start trusting the shop with the idea itself, and the design is worked out together, down to the right size for the space.
One day in Rome, from a phone to the wall
Then came the surprises. From one presenter’s public Instagram, the shop had taken the photographs of a single day in Rome, the Colosseum among the stops, digitized them from screenshots, printed them properly and framed them together under the title One day in Rome. On a phone, pictures like these scroll down the feed and are gone; on a wall, they are seen every day. And since the trip was shared with a friend, a second copy for that friend is one more print and one more frame.
The watercolor that brought the host to tears
The second surprise began with a family photograph from the host’s own Instagram, taken moments after a tooth had come out, the tooth tucked in a small plastic bag for the tooth fairy. The shop did not simply print it: the photograph was turned into a watercolor first, then framed. On live television, the host was moved to tears. In a life of thousands of pictures on a phone, Medi said, the one put up on the wall is the one a family remembers forever.
What custom framing costs
Because each frame is made for its piece, the price follows what the piece needs. Something irreplaceable goes behind museum glass, which keeps it from fading; something that could be replaced can take glazing with less protection and still be displayed properly. Size, moulding, mats and depth make up the rest, and the custom framing cost guide walks through each of those choices.
A gift that is still on the wall
As a framer, Medi gives friends custom frames as gifts, and coming back 10 or 15 years later, finds them still up on the wall. That was the point Medi made on air: a T-shirt ends up in the trash and an appliance gets replaced, but a piece displayed properly lasts for generations. Bring yours to the counter at 1671 Placentia Avenue in Costa Mesa, where the showroom and the production floor share one building, and start with the four corners.
