“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 stone chimney and mirror on top were preserved but painted all white.

A little reading corner with a sculptural chair by SANAA .

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.”

“The clients needed a lot of storage, so everything is a closet!” says Gabrielle.

The original walls that were structural—among them the ones that form the partition between the living room and the dining area and kitchen—needed to remain.

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.