We moved to our “retirement” house when our son was a senior in high school. The new house has a casita which became his apartment. He was on the crew team, so I decorated it with a rowing theme:
When he graduated from West Point, the Army came and moved every stick of that furniture and all his belongings to his duty post in GA, leaving me with an empty space that became my she-shed. Here are the “after” pics:
I spend a lot of “me” time in that space. (DH may not enter without knocking first.) When our son comes home, that’s where he stays, but there are no more memories there for him, and he’s definitely never coming home to live again. 
Before moving to this house, he cleaned out the room he grew up in, boxing only those few things that meant something to him. The rest of the stuff he valued was at boarding school, but those rooms are small, so not much to ship home after graduation. Again, all of it went with him when he moved to GA. His baby things and elementary school things were already boxed and put away, so there was very little that followed us here to the new house.