This week, The Washington Post will explore what it means to live and work in one of America's most affluent communities, where people actually talk of luck in landing a nice three-bedroom for under $400,000; where well-to-do parents form a nonprofit to build their children a playground; where economic opportunity draws technology workers from around the world; and where middle- and lower-income families struggle to keep pace.

The new affluence has brought obvious physical changes to Fairfax taller office buildings, bigger houses, longer traffic jams. But perhaps just as important is a regional change in psychology.

"For East Coast types like us, the first thing you thought of when you moved here was to go to Rockville or Bethesda," said Win Sharples, a New Yorker who moved to Fairfax in 1976. At his car dealership in Loudoun County, he sells $60,000 Morgan sports cars to wealthy Northern Virginians, among others. "Northern Virginia definitely had a redneck, sticks connotation. It was a mixed image of landed gentry and savages lurking in the bushes. You can hardly recognize that image now."

Need a $1,000 letter opener? Tiffany & Co. at Tysons Corner can oblige. Over at French Country Living in Great Falls, $2,800 gets you a wine rack "originally designed for French aristocracy." A couple hundred lands you a nice table at one of the half-dozen or so high-end steakhouses now drawing crowds in Tysons. And at the pricey Expo Design Center in Fairfax—its parking lot filled with cars from Maryland and the District customers can spend $12,000 on an oven range and $1,800 for their own wall-mounted "coffee system."