We have had great luck so far with my wife's 10 gallon in the bedroom. Honestly ours is WAYYYY overstocked and we still have had no problems with just doing biweekly 15% water changes.

We have looked into doing seahorses in the 10 gallon when we move the livestock to a larger home. For a 10 gallon you could keep LOADs of dwarf seahorses if you don't mind a little extra TLC. I looked into them and did alot of reading @ seahorse.org

As far as you lighting goes we got by for a good while on just regular florescent lightin and our zoas did just fine. Right now we have a single 65watt PC fixture over our 10 gallon and that seems to be more than enough light.

Filtration on our 10 gallon is just a Emperor 280 HOB power filter.

As far as stocking goes I would stick to hearty fish just because you are going to get a few more fluctuations in the parameters than you would with a larger system. As I said our 10 gallon is heavily stocked, right now we have a 2" Melanopus clown, a 1" Damsel, and a 1.5" Engineer goby, and have had no problems. I do frequent small water changes of about 1 - 1 1/2 gallons every 2 weeks and have never had and nitrate spikes or crashes. Also make sure to weigh the adult size of your choice in livestock in your deciscion, not just will it "fit" but will it be happy? As reef keepers we are already putting an animal in a box much smaller than it would naturally live in. This is much more true with nano tanks. Not to discourage you from doing a 10 gallon, just food for thought when picking a fish and making its habitat