Abstract: Since I am adopting a performative perspective here, following John McKenzie I ask how Żoliborz’s estate founders challenged architecture. Architects turned out to be performers who, through residential decorum, initiated new urban lifestyles. From the kitchen design (inspired by the Frankfurt kitchen model) to the furnishing of the flats, they shaped new rituals that over time have evolved into social habits. The residents were taught how to live in a modern, hygienic, rational, cultural, social and neighbourly way. By means of materialist analysis, I study the dense network of relations and connections between the various forms of social and intimate life, significant everyday devices and objects, architecture and flora, educational and gardening efforts; I analyse the relationship between the emancipation of women and workers and the ways in which the latter arranged their homes. Not only did the emancipation of women—who wanted to work professionally—turn out to be very important here, but mostly the emancipation of domestic servants, assumed by the founders of the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. In addition to workers and women, children turned out to be a significant actor for whom space in flats was arranged. Jeffrey Goldfarb’s concept of ‘the politics of small things’ convinced me to carry out a detailed analysis focused on the details of everyday life.