The question I get most is whether a big table will actually swallow the room, and the honest answer is almost always no, it's the chairs and the walking space around it that eat the room, not the tabletop itself. A large table reads as big in a showroom with nothing else around it. In an actual dining room with a sideboard and a doorway and a kid's backpack always dumped somewhere, it usually settles in fine.
Measuring is where people get it wrong, and I did too the first time, going by the table's footprint alone and forgetting that a person needs about two feet of pulled out chair behind them to sit down without elbowing the wall. So measure the table, then add roughly three to four feet on every side where chairs need to go, and check that against your actual room, not the empty rectangle you're imagining. Walkways matter too. If people have to turn sideways to get past the table to the kitchen, it's too big for that spot, no matter how good it looks on its own. Wood tops in oak or walnut are forgiving here because they visually ground a room rather than filling it, where a glass top in a tight space can make the whole room feel more crowded, not less, since your eye keeps tracking all that reflective surface.
Where a large table goes wrong is in rooms already busy with pattern or with a lot of other large furniture competing for attention. A heavily grained wood table next to a patterned rug and patterned curtains starts to look like a lot of noise, and a glass or glossy lacquer top in a room with big windows can throw glare around at certain times of day, which nobody warns you about until you're squinting through dinner. It also doesn't love uneven flooring. Older houses with floors that have settled a bit will rock a four legged table no matter how good it is, and you'll be shimming it with a folded napkin forever, which looks fine until a guest notices.
If you've got nothing to start from, go with a solid wood table on a simple trestle or four leg base, something plain enough that it doesn't compete with whatever chairs or rug you add later. Avoid starting with a heavily styled or very dark finish, because that commits the whole room to a mood before you've picked anything else. A lighter or mid tone wood gives you room to change your mind about everything around it for years.
And they do change. A good wood table picks up its own history, water rings nobody owns up to, a scratch from moving house, a faded patch where the sun hits every afternoon. That's not damage, that's just the table becoming yours, and it tends to look better for it, not worse.
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