Floor tiles make the most sense in kitchens, bathrooms, entryways and anywhere mud, wet dog or a dropped glass of wine is a weekly event rather than a once a year disaster. If you're in a rented place with no say over the subfloor, or a drafty old house where every room is a different height off true, go in with your eyes open, tiling is not forgiving of a floor that isn't flat, and it's not a weekend fix once it's down.
In an ordinary room, tile reads calmer than people expect, especially next to warm things that soften it: a wool runner by the sink, open wood shelving, a chunky stool someone's grandfather built badly but lovingly. It's the hard, cold surface that makes everything else in the room feel more textured by comparison. I notice it most in the morning, when low light comes in sideways across the kitchen and the grout lines throw these long thin shadows that you'd never see at noon. By evening with the lights on it just goes flat and practical again, which is sort of the point of a kitchen floor.
How it wears depends entirely on what's under the glaze. Porcelain shrugs off years of chair legs and dropped pans and barely shows it. Natural stone, the limestone and the softer travertines especially, will pick up scratches and etch marks from acidic spills if you don't seal it, and then reseal it every year or two depending on foot traffic, which is a chore nobody tells you about at the store. Grout is the real tell of age in any tiled floor. Light grout looks sharp for about eighteen months and then starts telling on you, every spill, every grease spatter, right there. Darker grout, a charcoal or a mid gray, hides that story and still looks intentional a decade in.
On finish, I'd steer most people toward a matte or honed surface over a glossy one. Glossy tile photographs well and is miserable to walk on wet, and it shows every scuff under direct light. A warm gray or a soft greige tile is about as close to foolproof as flooring gets, it won't fight with cabinets or walls you haven't picked yet.
Good tile doesn't really age the way wood does, it doesn't develop character so much as it just holds steady, scratched a little at the edges, a touch duller underfoot where everyone walks, the grout slowly earning its color back from a decade of actual use.
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