After all, who wants to clean and heat a bunch of empty bedrooms? Not Mel and Carol Butler, who live in a 4,700-square-foot home that actually felt pretty cozy when all seven kids were around. (In those days, they had an average of 533 square feet per person.) The Butlers want a new home with the same size kitchen and living room, but without all those bedrooms and without a big family room in the basement.

Butler is a real-estate agent. He's learned that not every client wants a smaller house after the kids are gone. Some want the biggest and fanciest place they can afford. Some do go smaller, perhaps to an elegant condo, which can cost more than their house did.

We must remember that humans are not all alike, notes architect Bee Losee, who lives with her husband and two children in a renovated Salt Lake bungalow. "We tend to see ourselves as similar, but if you look at the animal kingdom, we are as different as they," said Losee. "Some of us might be happy in a nest or a hive. Some of us might be happy in a cave. But some of us, for reasons I don't really understand, need something bigger."

As for architect Dave Brems, he's lived in a variety of spaces. A few years ago he was happy in a 1,600-square-foot home in Emigration Canyon. "It was energy efficient and easy to maintain," he says.

Currently, he and his wife and two children are happy in their 3,200-square-foot home. But they've also been happy, for weeks at a time, living on a 26-foot sailboat, sleeping head-to-feet and stuffing their possessions into every available nook.

The Brems recently bought 10 acres of land near Boulder, in Garfield County. It is a beautiful spot that adjoins thousands of acres of public land. It is just too pretty to mar with something big and man-made, Brems feels.

So the retreat he will build on this place will be small, with a big deck. Maybe it will be as large as 600 square feet, he says, but probably more like 400 square feet. Or smaller. Maybe the house will just have a kitchen and a bathroom, 100 square feet in all. Compared to living on a boat, he says, it will feel palatial.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com