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If you like taking long, luxurious baths, Page Wilson isn't the man to build your bathroom. But if you're craving a simpler lifestyle and a home focused on quality and longevity, he could be your guy.

A quick glance at his Web site, www.paulpagedwellings.com, reveals a keen eye for beauty and modernity intertwined. But it takes a closer look to discover the designer's true passion: regression to an uncomplicated time. It's a throw-back to his first career; as a rice and soybean farmer in Arkansas, he often built small, efficient structures and carefully considered scarce resources like water for his crops.

Now, he takes empty lots and builds small-scale buildings using quality products that consume less energy or water, or that will last for decades. And when homeowners first move in, they sometimes find there isn't room for their “stuff."

“It's counterintuitive to what everyone wants to do, which is buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume,” Wilson says. “What you have to figure out with these houses is how to live simply, how to live with your basic stuff, and how to live only with what you want to keep.”

His Rock 3 Project in Little Rock's downtown SoMa district will bring urban infill to the blighted area and link to restaurants, shops and MacArthur Park. Ideally, more people would live in downtown areas, he says, within walking distance of most daily needs. But going green doesn't always require a big move.

“Anybody can do green. You can do it if redo you bathroom and you put in a low-flow toilet and shower and faucet,” he says. Wilson himself builds what he calls “light green” homes, meaning they implement both cutting-edge and low-tech green materials.

While he says Arkansas is behind the curve on green buildings, the country's economy may have sounded the toll.

“I think the tide just turned recently,” he says. “People are reassessing how they want to live.”