Two partners, swatch cards and the New York furniture trade.

Walker Zanger began in New York, not on the West Coast where much of its later growth happened. The company’s history says that in 1952 Leon Zanger and Marvin Walker each put money into a new business, and that, “with marble swatch cards in hand,” they sold Portuguese marble tabletops to the local furniture industry. Kitchen & Bath Business, reporting in January 2021, gives the start as 1953, with Zanger and his partner importing marble from Portugal for tabletops; we give both years.

The Portuguese connection was personal. Kitchen & Bath Business says Zanger was born in Belgium, that his family fled Europe during the German invasion of 1940, and that before reaching the United States they lived for some years in Portugal, where he watched workers paving the streets with marble. The material he had seen in Belgian museums and palaces was, in Portugal, underfoot, and the company’s first product line grew out of that.

The business grew in both directions across the country. The company says it opened its first showroom at 100 Hudson Street in Manhattan in 1954; its history includes a photograph of Zanger in the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, in 1955; and in 1958 it opened its first office in Los Angeles, where John Iberti led the expansion while Zanger ran New York. For years the furniture side remained central: the company says it sold stone tabletops, chairs and fine hardwoods to American furniture makers including Baker, Henredon, Thomasville and Bernhardt. Kitchen & Bath Business dates the move into stone tiles to 1963, when Zanger began importing them for American homes.

From the Getty Villa to the Las Vegas Strip.

Projects gave the company its reputation. Walker Zanger says it supplied Italian marble for the Getty Villa in Malibu, which opened in 1974, and that its Italian office bought antique marble from the Vatican, by the pound, to recreate ancient Roman floor patterns for the museum. Kitchen & Bath Business also credits Zanger with sourcing Italian stone for the villa.

Tile followed stone. The company says that in the 1970s it expanded into ceramic tile, importing traditional hand-painted tiles such as its Madeira collection, and that showrooms opened in Costa Mesa, California, in 1980, to serve Orange County, and in Houston in 1981. It describes offering marble mosaics on mesh backing for easier installation, and bringing to market glass tile from a small artisan factory in Oceanside, California.

From 1994, the company says, it moved away from European hand-painted decorative tile toward historically themed ceramic collections of its own, with sculptural decorative pieces and deep colour; it names Avignon, Ceramica Alhambra and Tiberon among them. In Las Vegas, it says, it supplied marble tile and decorative mosaics to the Monte Carlo and Bellagio hotels, and it opened a showroom there in 1996. More showrooms followed in Dallas in 1999, San Francisco in 2000 and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2001, and the company says it introduced Metalismo, a line of stainless-steel mosaics.

Design and documentation.

Tile makers and tile brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small studios where a design is pressed, glazed and fired by hand to large manufacturers whose surfaces are sold through showrooms, distributors and home-improvement stores. Some names make every piece themselves, some import what they sell, and some do a mixture of both under one label.

A tile brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a repeatable vocabulary: a family of glazes, a set of patterns, a way of edging or texturing the surface, and the catalogues and showrooms that present them. Because a name can outlast its founders, change owners or move its production, the questions behind each one are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tile is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its tile is made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designer collections, a Mexican tile factory and two new owners.

In the 2000s the company leaned on designers. It says it asked the interior designer Michael Berman to create Studio Moderne, a collection of larger-scale ceramic and stone designs drawing on Hollywood Regency and mid-century design, launched in 2008, and that in 2014 it partnered with the architecture firm Robert A.M. Stern on a ceramic tile line. It also says it took full ownership of a ceramic tile factory in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and that it supplied stone and tile for the Bergdorf Goodman flagship in 2020 and Revere White and Port Laurent marbles for the lobby and elevator floors of the Hard Rock Hotel in New York, which opened in 2022. New showrooms opened in Port Chester, New York, in 2016, Costa Mesa in 2023 and San Leandro in 2024, the company says. It describes its materials as coming from places such as a quarry in France, a ceramic studio in Morocco and a mosaic workshop in Italy.

Ownership has changed twice in recent years. Kitchen & Bath Business reported in July 2021 that Mosaic Companies had announced the acquisitions of Walker Zanger and the stone distributor Opustone. Mosaic was described as the holding company that also included Surfaces Southeast, and as a partnership between Albert Claramonte, the founder of Surfaces Southeast, and The Baupost Group, a Boston investment manager. Then, on 26 August 2025, Transom Capital announced that Artivo Surfaces, a company it backs and the parent of Virginia Tile and GalleherDuffy, had completed its acquisition of the Walker Zanger and Anthology brands from Mosaic Companies through a court-supervised sale process.

Through those changes the brand has kept the two founders’ surnames, Walker and Zanger, on a business that moved from marble tabletops to stone slabs, ceramic collections and mosaics.

For a design guide, Walker Zanger shows how a stone importer can build an identity from material and provenance rather than from a single product: quarries, workshops and named collections. Compare Daltile, the Dallas tile maker, and Ann Sacks, another American tile and stone house. For this guide we use nero marble, antique brass, Carrara veil and limestone with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Walker Zanger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.