The honest answer is fewer than most people buy and more than most people own. A household that hosts occasionally needs one set of dinner plates it likes enough to use every night, one set of smaller plates that covers salad, starters and dessert, and two or three serving pieces that can carry food from the kitchen to the table without looking like cookware. That is it. Everything past that is either replacement stock for breakage or a second aesthetic you will end up choosing between anyway. The number that matters is not how many plates you own, it is how many you can set at once. Eight is the useful figure. Eight lets you feed six people and absorb two breakages before the set stops working. Six leaves you one accident away from an odd table. Twelve is storage you will resent unless you genuinely seat twelve, which almost nobody does more than twice a year. Buy for eight, buy once, and let the smaller plates do the flexible work.

A dinner plate earns its price through how it survives ordinary use, not how it photographs on a set table. Porcelain and bone china are fired hot enough to be non-porous, which is why they resist staining from tomato and turmeric and why they come out of a dishwasher looking the same as they went in. Hand-painted decoration is where the cost sits, and it is also the part most likely to fade if the glaze sits over rather than under the pattern. Ask which it is before you buy a pattern you love. Size is the other thing worth checking against your own cupboards, because a lot of designer dinner plates run wider than the standard shelf and a stack that does not fit gets used less. The eight below sit between $170 and $190, which is roughly where hand-decorated porcelain starts without moving into collector territory.

Side plates are the pieces that make a table look considered without any extra effort, and they are the ones that get used most often outside of dinner. A salad plate is a breakfast plate. A dessert plate is a cheese plate. A bread plate holds the olives. Because they are smaller they are cheaper per piece than a dinner plate, and because they sit on top of the dinner plate they are the easiest place to introduce colour or pattern without committing your whole table to it. This is the practical argument for buying plain dinner plates and decorative smaller ones rather than the other way round. A patterned dinner plate has to work under everything you will ever cook. A patterned side plate only has to work with bread. If you are building a table slowly, buy the small plates second and the serving pieces third, and let the small plates be the ones with personality.

If you are starting from nothing, buy eight dinner plates in something plain and hard-wearing, then eight smaller plates with whatever pattern you actually like. That is two purchases and a table that works for both a Tuesday and a birthday. Serving pieces can wait until you have hosted twice and noticed what you kept improvising. Buying in the other order, which is what most people do, leaves you with beautiful platters and nothing to eat off. If you take one thing away, make it this: the plate you use every night deserves more of the budget than the plate you use twice a year, and it should be the one you buy first.