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Even so, the house still needed a total gut renovation. Working with her longtime collaborator, architect Glenn Leitch, Wasserman added a bath upstairs to serve two comfortable bedrooms that were reconfigured for her and Milly. Where the original downstairs had been a dark warren of seven separate rooms, Wasserman opened up the space and created one large common area with an additional bedroom.

"The kitchen is open to the living room, which is open to the dining room," Wasserman explains. She adds with a laugh, "And for Milly, everything is about going to the refrigerator 14 times a day. Now it's only one room away from any part of the downstairs."

With the renovations complete, the stage was set for Wasserman to play. Throughout the house she installed custom-made slatted radiator covers in natural and painted woods. "The design allows the radiators to breathe and it covers up what most people don't want to see," she explains. Wasserman liked them so much she began installing them for clients.

In the master bedroom, a set of sleek-looking drawers gave rise to another innovative touch. Undecided on the hardware for the drawer pulls, Wasserman improvised with loops of blue painter's tape. "I thought, 'Why not replace the tape with leather?'" she recalls. "So I created leather pulls with a little pin to give you something to grab."

Of course, for all the experimental hits, there are sometimes misses, such as a pair of floating drawers positioned by Wasserman's bed. "I loved the look, which was very low and Japanese," she says. "But then I realized it's inconvenient to bend all the way down to reach a book or your glasses." For clients, she now places the drawers higher up.