The Stockholm Furniture Fair displayed Scandinavian talent for making timeless and contemporary creations out of natural materials, writes Emma Cullinan

An artificial garden by German designer Konstantin Grcic greeted visitors at the entrance to this year's recent Stockholm Furniture Fair.

The mix of plants, textiles, furniture and other objects were surely a reference to our current zeal for combining interiors and exteriors, as well as to the global embrace of nature.

This fair attracts people from all over the world but is known as a central meeting place for Nordic design and Leila Ahmedova from the Nordic Living furniture shop based in Blackrock, Dublin, was there.

"The Offecct Swedish furniture company is on the rise at the moment," she says, "and this company really did stand out at the fair."

Offecct makes furniture for meeting areas, receptions and other public spaces - and aims to create furniture that makes places. This season the colours red, lime green and a variety of blues dominated.

Swedish furniture company Bla Station, meanwhile, was making stunning pieces out of rejected material. The Black Chair, by Fredrik Mattson, uses wood that has been discarded due to inconsistencies but Bla Station has made a virtue of knots, colour variations and other apparent "no-nos". In a reversal of Ford's famous slogan, the Black Chair comes in all sorts of colours, from lilac, pink and orange to gold leaf.

Finnish company Artek, associated with architect Alvar Aalto, continued its famous designer's penchant for curving natural materials, with a bamboo collection - or, more properly, the Bambu Series. The oriental grass furniture, designed by Henrik Tjaerby, was launched in a wooden house built for the exhibition, where visitors were treated to an organic breakfast before the unveiling of the new range. A launch that underscored the new products' green credentials, then. The company also dug into its archives and relaunched the genius Aalto's Golden Bell light fitting.

The trend for natural materials was carried through by Woodnotes, a company that makes paper rugs and blinds for commercial interiors. This year it launched a paper room divider comprising a wall of "snowflakes": an environmentally-friendly product depicting something that we might lose if the planet gets much warmer.

With Office Line showing ergonomic furniture, the Stockholm Fair displayed a continuation of the Scandinavian talent for making timeless and contemporary creations out of natural materials.