The Red That Started an Argument: How Space Cherry Found Its Colour

There is a specific argument that Cindy Boujaklian and Jason Hutton have been having, in various forms, since the earliest days of the NuRetro project. It is not really about product design. It is about hockey.

Cindy is Salton’s Product Designer, based in Montreal. Jason is Salton’s President, based in Toronto. The two cities have a particular relationship at the best of times. Put a Montreal designer and a Toronto executive in a room and ask them to agree on a shade of red, and what you get—eventually—is Space Cherry.

Where the Colour Came From

The NuRetro collection was always going to include a red. That was not in question. Red has been part of the Canadian kitchen for as long as there have been Canadian kitchens—in enamelware, in ceramic, in the cotton tea towels hanging from cast-iron stove handles in farmhouses from Prince Edward Island to the Interior of British Columbia. Red in a Canadian kitchen is not a statement. It is a tradition.

But which red?

Jason’s instinct was immediate and, in his words, non-negotiable. “For me it was always Toronto Red,” he says. “It’s that particular depth—not orange-red, not fire-engine red. The red on a Raptor’s jersey, on a TTC streetcar, on the old enamel signs you still find in diner windows on Danforth. That red is Toronto. It felt right for a brand that is fundamentally about Canadian kitchens.”

Cindy, reviewing swatches in her Montreal studio, had a different starting point entirely. “I grew up watching my à la Habs,” she says, pronouncing it in the particular way Montrealers do—affectionately, definitively. “The Canadiens red is a specific thing. It’s saturated and deep and it has warmth in it. It’s never harsh. That red has been in Montreal kitchens for a hundred years because it’s the red of celebration, of family, of the game on Saturday night. That’s what I wanted to bring to the appliance.”

The Argument

The two reds are not the same red. This is not a subjective observation. Cindy pulled the Pantone references. Jason printed the swatches. The Montreal red runs warmer, pulling toward the brick of the old terraced houses in the Plateau and the cast-iron fire escapes that run down their sides.

They went back and forth for three weeks. Cindy sent Jason a photograph of her relatives kitchen in Rosemont—a 1960s row house with original red enamel canisters on open shelving above a white porcelain sink. Jason sent Cindy a photograph of a 1940s Toronto diner, its counter stools and signage in the particular red that means the city to him.

“We were both right,” Cindy says now, laughing. “That was the annoying part. Both reds were genuinely right. They both had history and meaning and a real claim to what a Canadian kitchen looks like. The job was to find the red that held both of them.”

Space Cherry is that red. It sits precisely between the two—warm enough to carry the Montreal resonance, deep and rich enough to satisfy Jason’s sense of what Toronto red means. In daylight, it reads one way. Under warm kitchen light, it shifts. That was deliberate.

“It needed to be alive,” Cindy says. “A colour that looks exactly the same in every light is a colour that is playing it safe. Space Cherry is not playing it safe.”

What a Canadian Kitchen Actually Looks Like

The design brief for the NuRetro collection asked Cindy to think carefully about Canadian domestic heritage—not as a historical exercise, but as a practical guide to what colours and forms belong in a Canadian kitchen.

Her research took her through decades of Canadian home photography, through the collections of the Canadian Museum of History, and through her own family’s kitchen in Rosemont, which has not changed substantially since her mother was a child. What she found was consistent: the Canadian kitchen’s relationship with colour is one of confidence and longevity. Colours were chosen to last, to wear well, to age into the room rather than fight against it.

“Canadianism in design isn’t about showing off,” she says. “It’s about quality that reveals itself slowly. A well-made thing that looks better after ten years than it did on day one. That’s what we were trying to build into every finish in this collection—and Space Cherry specifically. It should look as good the day you sell the house as it did the day it arrived.”

The Name

Space Cherry was Marketing Coordinator’s, Adam Rakovalis’ idea. “We went through probably forty names,” he says. “All the obvious ones—Cardinal, Garnet, Crimson, Heritage Red. They were all fine. None of them were right.”

The name Space Cherry came from a late-night conversation about the collection’s broader design language—the way the NuRetro forms reference the optimistic futurism of the postwar period, the era when Salton was founded and when the electric kitchen appliance was itself a new and exciting idea.

“The Space Age was about believing the future was going to be better than the past,” Adam says. “Space Cherry is that feeling—something classic and warm and familiar, but reaching forward at the same time. It felt like what NuRetro is trying to be.”

Jason approved it the same day he sent the name. “I read it and thought, yes. That’s it. I didn’t even need to see it in context.”

Two Cities. One Colour.

Cindy and Jason still do not fully agree on which city Space Cherry belongs to. Cindy maintains that the warmth is Montreal—that anyone who has spent time in a Rosemont kitchen in winter, with the Habs game on the radio and something on the stove, will recognise it immediately. Jason maintains that the depth is Toronto—that it is the red of a city that takes itself seriously, that builds things to last.

They agree on one thing: it is Canadian. Genuinely, specifically, without compromise Canadian.

“There is no other place that would have produced this red,” Cindy says. “You would not find it in a Swedish design studio or an Italian one. It comes from a particular kind of winter, a particular kind of kitchen, a particular argument between two particular people who both happen to be right.”

Space Cherry is available exclusively in the NuRetro collection. Preorders are open now at Salton.com. The collection ships August 10, 2026. Preorders placed before August 10 include an extended warranty automatically.