MARGIE LEVINSON

Age - 60-something

Occupation - Travel agent, former high-school English teacher

Home - Creve Coeur

At a stage when many of her friends are downsizing, Margie Levinson bucked the trend. To have "a real dining room," large enough for dinner parties, but mostly to have space for the treasures she inherited from her parents, Margie almost doubled her living quarters by moving two years ago into a nearly 1,500-square-foot Creve Coeur condo.

With an ample assist from veteran interior designer Jerry Birkhead, grandeur now reigns. With Birkhead, Margie found a lengthy, French-looking, floral-painted cupboard, topped by two towering, matching china-and-display cases.

By separating the units and sandwiching the cupboard between the cases, Birkhead covered a dining-room wall. Well, more than covered it. When one of the case's top molding proved 2 inches too long to squeeze into the room, Birkhead had an easy solution. He inconspicuously trimmed 1 inch from the right side of one case's top molding and 1 inch from the other's left side. To further improve the proportions, he added 14-inch platforms below all three pieces. Presto! A wall of appropriately sized furniture.

He also introduced multihued drama. In the spare bedroom where Margie and her pals play bridge amid pictures painted by Levinson's mother, a bold, amateur artist, the color scheme is apple green and cherry red. The ceiling, which Birkhead considers "a fifth wall," is pale green.

In the eggplant-colored living room, where purple draperies cascade from just below the ceiling into graceful, puddlelike shapes on the floor, the furniture and pillows are upholstered in eight different, though complementary, fabrics.

The condo's walls and doors, once plain Jane, tell their own story. By adding untold inches of moldings, casements and trims, Birkhead created focal points and pediments where none existed. In the kitchen, plain doors had fronted the pantry, some of the shelves and the alcove that hides the washer and dryer. Curiously, these doors had been installed at various heights, creating almost a zigzag pattern on the two walls they covered. To standardize the mishmash, Birkhead added trims in tall rectangular patterns to each door, then layered on sufficient trim above and around doors so that all trims reached to the ceiling. The result: uniformity, which Birkhead crowned with a red ceiling.

Margie grew up in Connecticut. Her mother, "Bobbie" Rieder, died five years ago. Her father, Murray, a stockbroker and then a partner in a chain of movie theaters, passed away 10 years earlier. An only child, Margie now has the mirror they received as an engagement gift, the alabaster lamp that sat on their dresser and many more treasures.

"I feel so fabulous and so lucky to have what brings me such joy," she says, tears coming to her eyes. "What Jerry has done with all of my parents' treasures, I feel so much love."

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To see a gallery of images from Margie's home, go to stltoday.com/lifestyle