How to choose a dining table you won't outgrow

A dining table is the piece people agonise over the longest, and usually for the wrong reasons. Finish and colour are easy to live with. Getting the size wrong is not.

Start with the room, not the table

Before you look at a single table, measure your room and subtract 90cm from every side you'll walk around. That's the chair-pull-out-and-walk-behind allowance. Whatever rectangle is left is the largest table the room can actually take. Most people discover it's smaller than they hoped, and that finding out now is much cheaper than finding out on delivery day.

Then work out how many people you really seat

Allow 60cm of table edge per person. A 180cm table seats six comfortably, or eight if two sit at the ends. Buy for the number you host most weeks, not for the Christmas you host once a year, an extension leaf or a bench solves the once-a-year problem without you eating breakfast at a table built for twelve.

Round, oval or rectangular?

• Rectangular seats the most people per square metre and suits long, narrow rooms.
• Round is the most sociable, everyone can see everyone, and softens a boxy room, but it stops being practical much past 140cm across, because nobody can reach the middle.
• Oval gives you a rectangle's seating with a round table's traffic flow. It's the quiet best answer in an open-plan space.

The measurement most people forget

Apron height. That's the gap between the underside of the table frame and the floor, it decides whether your chairs actually slide under, and whether tall guests can cross their legs. Aim for at least 62cm of clear height under the apron. If you're buying chairs separately, check their seat height too: 28 to 30cm between seat and tabletop is the comfortable range.

On live-edge and epoxy tops

A live-edge or river table is a single slab, so no two are the same and the one you see is the one you get. It also means the width varies along its length. If you're planning around it, measure at the narrowest point and design from there.

If you'd like us to check a table against your room's measurements before you commit, send us the dimensions on WhatsApp, we do this most days, and it takes about ten minutes.