“It circulates freely,” says Gabrielle Toledano of the ribbon-like walls that wend their way through a Parisian apartment she recently designed for a young family with a new baby. With her firm, Toledano Architects, based in Paris and Tel Aviv, Gabrielle decided to take on the project shortly after returning from her own maternity leave, and wanted to bring “a light element” into the traditional, typical Haussmannian apartment.
The family, lovers of art and design who work in law and finance, came to Gabrielle just after purchasing the apartment. It still retained its original layout: decorative plaster moldings at the ceilings, a long balcony, and hardwood floors in a timeless herringbone pattern. Gabrielle wanted to “preserve the layers of history while giving the space a strong contemporary identity,” she says, and make the apartment “suited to its 21st-century inhabitants.”
Gabrielle’s answer to that challenge was to remove as many of the existing interior partitions as possible, which she felt were a major constraint. “I started designing but I felt like my hands were tied and I couldn’t design as freely as I wanted,” she says. And although she demolished the walls, she retained the existing floors, detailed crown moldings, and ceiling medallions.
She then inserted two curved walls that wound their way throughout the 1,400-square-foot apartment, creating organically shaped rooms: a master suite with a bedroom, open bathroom, and dressing room in one area, and the children’s area with another bedroom and bathroom in another corner. The free-form shapes of the walls are enlivened by the grain patterns of the plywood cladding. “Wood is a living material and it felt very suited to the organic shapes I designed,” says Gabrielle.
The large space left at the center of the apartment becomes a flowing, open kitchen and dining area separated from the living area by the few original walls that were kept in place because of their load-bearing, structural nature. These, in strong contrast to the smooth wood surfaces of the new walls, are painted a crisp white and retain their paneling, wainscot, crown molding, and even a fireplace with a mirror and historic trim. “The plywood gives a ‘young’ feeling,” explains Gabrielle, in contrast to the historic details.
As the wall winds its way through the space, it becomes not only a sculptural element but a practical one as well: It creates niches for storage, houses shelving and closets, hides a powder room by the entrance, creates openings for doorways, and wraps itself around the kitchen area. But one thing it does not do is block views of the original ceiling. Gabrielle explains that the ribbon is intentionally “lower than the ceilings in order to keep the signs of the former historic layout.”
Working with a carpenter, Gabrielle had the walls prefabricated in a workshop, where the rails, or wood guidelines onto which the walls were installed, were cut using a laser cutter; three thin layers of plywood were bent around the curves to create a stable surface, she explains. The walls were installed along the curved rails that had been placed along the floor; that work was completed in a single day. The walls, she notes, were an important part of meeting the tight budget. Also erected was the boxlike frame that created the bathroom within the master bedroom area.
Smaller spaces, like the bathrooms, provide bold contrasts to the otherwise minimalist palette. The master bathroom features large slabs of gray onyx, black smoked glass, and circular motifs for drama; the child’s bathroom is clad in green onyx with a polycarbonate ceiling that refracts the sunlight that enters through the small window. There’s even a moment of neon orange in a corner of the kid’s bedroom where the walls and floor are covered in resin, which bounces light around the small nook.
The clients “really followed my lead with the project,” says Gabrielle, and let her bring an unexpected but poetic sensibility that layers contemporary design over the historical, almost as if the space itself were a piece of artwork. “The movements of the wave and the way it catches light is quite nice and very abstract. You forget that it’s actually walls and doors,” she says. We can’t help but agree.
