ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on wealthy and middle-class homes in the regional capital of São Paulo, 1 in the years between 1870 and 1920. In this period, the city entered the market of consumption goods and underwent a demographic explosion marked by cultural and ethnic diversity. The city dwellers experienced an increase in social mobility that generated new forms of social distinction. My aim is to demonstrate that the notion of modernity sought by the enriched or emergent sections of society was strategic to reformulating social relationships, which included the space within the home. The home played a strategic role in this process, since it was a society that was little-industrialized. It is in the home that new values and behaviours were generated. What will be discussed here is the relationship between domestic work and ornamentation, both as indissociable models of inscription in the modern world. 2
