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Soft furnishings are your best friend here - a good rug, heavy curtains, and upholstered furniture will absorb sound way better than bare hard surfaces. Wall hangings, tapestries, or acoustic panels break up sound waves before they bounce around. If you want something less obvious, bookshelves packed with books work surprisingly well since all those spines and pages soak up noise. Blankets draped over furniture or even a few decorative cushions scattered around make a real difference without needing to renovate anything.
The ceiling height is actually working against you more than the floor - sound bounces up there and comes back down as reverb. If you can't lower it or add panels to the ceiling itself, try placing some taller bookcases, standing shelves, or even a tall plant in the corners to break up that vertical echo path. It's less obvious than draping the walls everywhere and actually works pretty well.
don't rely on just one or two soft items scattered around - the echo comes from all that empty space above you, so you need consistent coverage. i dealt with this in my place after ripping out some old carpet, and what actually made a difference was layering: i put up a couple of fabric wall panels on the worst-sounding walls, hung a largish tapestry opposite the kitchen (hard tile and glass nightmare), and added a thicker rug in the center. the high ceiling is tricky because you can't easily treat it, but addressing the walls and floor coverage brought the echo down enough that people stopped sounding like they were in a cave.
I had the same problem when I rearranged my place - the echo was driving me nuts until I realized the real culprit was the empty wall space itself. Heavy bookshelves, even half-filled ones, break up those hard reflective surfaces way more than people think, and they're basically free if you already have books lying around. Combining that with a decent area rug and some heavier window treatments made a huge difference without needing to buy acoustic panels or rearrange everything.
One thing people often miss is that placement matters as much as the items themselves - stuffing all your soft stuff into one corner or along one wall leaves the rest of the room reflective, so you need to spread absorption around the whole space, especially near that high ceiling where the worst bounce happens. Also watch out for over-correcting: too many heavy materials everywhere can make the room feel dead and claustrophobic instead of just less echoey.
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