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I know that both facade and façade are valid in British English. Is that also true for American English? Or should facade be used when writing something for American customers?

This is something that gets used in a Luminaire catalog, and I just stumbled over the French ç in the American version.

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M-W lists both variants -- both are valid. – z7sg Ѫ Nov 9 '11 at 16:56

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According to Google ngrams, "facade" is far more popular than "façade". So I would just write "facade" unless you want to emphasize the "Frenchness" for stylistic or marketing reasons.

ngram comparison showing facade as far more popular

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While I agree, it is important to note that those results are generated by computer scanning, which is likely to understand "ç" as "c", which is exactly what happened in this case: books.google.com/… (and probably many others) – Jim Nov 9 '11 at 14:26
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Note: "façade" appears in ~1M titles according to google books. – Unreason Nov 9 '11 at 14:40
@Jim: It's true, there will be lots of cases of bad OCR. But I tried searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English and it had zero hits for "façade" so I just went with ngrams. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Nov 9 '11 at 16:40
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The cedilla (ç) beneath the letter ‘c’ is used in French to show that it is to be pronounced as /s/ and not as /k/. Most French people will know that anyway, so it is as otiose in French as it certainly is in English. Since facade is now an English word as much as it is a French one, there’s no need to follow French practice.

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It's no more or less otiose than the other French diacritical marks. Certainly the first time I read the word I wasn't sure how to pronounce it so the cedilla would have helped. – z7sg Ѫ Nov 9 '11 at 15:25
It's often difficult to know how to pronounce any new word, with or without diacritics. The answer is available in most dictionaries. Where a French word has not become completely anglicized, then it may be usual to retain the accents, as in, for example, 'dénouement'. The only fully anglicized French word I can think in which the accent is shown more often than not is 'café'. – Barrie England Nov 9 '11 at 16:11
You are making unsubstantiated claims about usage. – z7sg Ѫ Nov 9 '11 at 17:01
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cafe > café – Hugo Nov 9 '11 at 17:39
Alternatively, 'kaff'. – Barrie England Nov 10 '11 at 8:00

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