Custom Framing Showroom
We are not your ordinary little frame shop...
APF-The Art of Picture Framing is where The Flipper Room began. You enter the the framing showroom and design center to thousands of frame samples and design options. We do all of the work in house! We have full selections of mats, fabrics, liners, fillets, strainers or stretcher bars and custom mirrors made to any size.
Other than prints, posters, paintings and canvas art, we frame vanity mirrors, headboards, memorabilia and artifacts, jewelry, bulletin boards, chalkboards... You name it!
We love to be creative and help inspire "out of the box" ideas. Whatever you would like to frame or use frame moulding for we can make it happen.
Our picture framing design center is open 10am-5pm Monday - Friday
What... A Pinball Gallery?
The Flipper Room is where pinball meets picture framing.
The pinball arcade is open to the public. Dip into that change jar or bring in some bills for our change machine because our games take quarters (like they were meant to).
Prices range from $0.25 to $1.00 per game.
Come see all of the amazing art and picture framing that compliments our eclectic selection of pinball machines.
Pinball Springs Into Focus at Frame Shop
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
By Peter Hartlaub, Culture Critic - Oct 2, 2025
When Mike Moretti’s friend offered a pinball machine for his framing shop more than a decade ago, the Concord business owner’s reply was quick and practical. “My very immediate response was ‘No.’” Moretti remembers. “Those machines are really heavy. … And I don’t want my crew playing pinball. We have a pretty tight schedule.”
Today, it’s hard to tell where The Flipper Room starts and the Art of Picture Framing ends. The pinball parlor/frame shop sounds like a confounding combination. And yet, if you spend even a little time here, it starts to make perfect sense.
My first Flipper Room experience involves getting lost; even my GPS seems to throw up its arms in defeat. The business is in the middle of an industrial parkway on a long curve behind a Costco. The building itself is a nondescript warehouse with a chunky rock wall, like the side of a 1970s Safeway. Which makes walking inside even more of a Narnia-wardrobe experience.
To the right of the entrance is a tasteful retail space: a sturdy wood table in front of a wall of frames in all colors and sizes. Need an ornate gold leaf frame for the Monet in your new mansion? Decorating your dorm room with a Zach Bryan poster? Moretti and his team have you covered. Look anywhere else, and you’ll see a labyrinth into multicolored madness. Hallways filled with pop art and neon colors lead to big rooms lined with pinball machines, which spill into smaller rooms with more machines. While most modern arcades have been reborn as museums, The Flipper Room is free to enter and still takes quarters. Thirty games in all give the space a hyperkinetic life, blinking and chirping and beckoning even when the place is empty. A black cat named Spacer (it’s a framing reference) paces near the front desk.
At the center is Moretti, whose deadpan demeanor fits perfectly. The Oakley resident, who has been in the frame business for almost three decades, fended off pinball for more than a year. But when the friend who’d offered the game died, his son — an employee at the frame shop — persuaded Moretti to haul the “Star Wars” pinball machine into the lobby as a tribute. Employees loved it. Customers loved it even more. Frame shop workers who heard pinball noises on the other side of the wall started calling it “the flipper room.”
As Moretti acquired more pinball machines, he noticed something unexpected: The games seemed to help his core business. The Flipper Room opened as its own enterprise in 2017. “People who first walk in say, ‘I don’t get it. How does this match?” Moretti says. He just tells them to give it a chance. “Then when they walk out they say, ‘This is really cool. I have something I need framed.’”
The pinball side of the business has become one big family project for Moretti’s wife, Katie, and their children Marley, 16; Phinley, 14; and Anna, 12. The “Stranger Things” pinball machine sits under a canopy of Christmas lights, and a “Labyrinth” game is adorned with Jim Henson-style puppets. Themes are in constant rotation; “Evil Dead” and “Addams Family” machines have moved into a haunted house room that keeps adding decorations for Halloween.
The space is open during business hours Monday through Saturday. Tuesday night is an unposted league night, when up to 50 people gather to play in teams, and the community really shows itself. Spencer Fennik, a veterinary radiologist who arrives at league night in work scrubs, said he was new to the Bay Area when a co-worker invited him for pinball this year. Fennik was a beginner, and the group was a wild mix — someone in finance, a police officer, a guy who fixes pinball machines for a living — but he was immediately embraced. “I remember Day 1, some folks said, ‘We’re going back to our house to play more. Do you want to come?’” Fennik remembers. “And I’m like, ‘Do you even know my name?’”
Kwang Chong and Amy Martin are engaged, one of several couples who met at the Flipper Room. The warehouse on the industrial parkway is their first choice for a wedding venue. “It sounds like a cliché when you hear a bunch of people say it, but pinball has really changed my life,” Chong says. Full of players, the space makes even more sense. Pinball art lines the walls; Moretti explains that machine sales have shifted from arcades to private collectors, who often want to decorate their basements and rec rooms with matching art. Everything on display is for sale.
My final question is about money. Moretti says the pinball pays for itself, and that’s beside the point. He talks about a low point in his career, when his wholesale business was growing, but clients wanted cheaper, low quality work. “I started to resent what I was building,” he says. Moretti follows that with a memory from a recent workday: His workload was arguably more chaotic — a complicated frame order for an artist, a pinball machine that needed repair — but he realized how much more he enjoyed his drive to work. It “brought back joy in my work life,” Moretti said of the Flipper Room. “And I feel that every day here.”