A Place To Love

After moving out of a big house with too much stuff, Karen Kelly finds it’s never too late for your very first space.

- Jeannette Cooperman

Karen Kelly went straight from a dorm to a starter apartment in Brentwood Forest with her new husband. By the time they divorced, years later, they were living in a big house crammed with stuff. About to live alone for the first time, Kelly went apartment hunting—and fell in love with an 850-squarefoot one-bedroom in Clayton on the Park.

“You can make this work,” promised the community director, Penny Wagner, who lives there herself—and loves clothes and shoes every bit as much as Kelly does.

And so began the Great Purge.

Luckily, Kelly, who’s the general sales manager at KMOX-AM, is a whiz at organizing: “I go to my friends’ houses and wind up cleaning out their refrigerators. ” She went up, adding high shelves in her three closets (one of which contains a small washer/dryer). Then she went low, adding a pole to hang her boots. For off-season and formal clothes, she made the inspired purchase of three high-gloss white IKEA armoires. Side by side, with handles changed out for slender bars of Grecian gold, the set’s chic enough for the living room.