In this article we intend to demonstrate that the transformations of things and objects in some selected essays from the period between 1900 and 1930 are not only a reflection of the socio-economic changes produced in Spain, but also the symptom of a transformation inherent to the essay itself, which is very significant. It is a new status of things, increasingly objectified, that emerges from 1916, in a way already from 1914. What is understood by "common" and "vulgar" is metamorphosed in depth, acquiring more and more a value of domesticity and symbolic intranscendence, but not functional.