Libby Sellers, right, a former curator at the London Design Museum, tries out an outdoor chair by Patricia Urquiola. The lacy, powder-coated metal chairs for Emu, an Italian manufacturer, are made with advanced technology that creates variations from piece to piece.

THE New York Times / Nigel Dickinson

Maison et Objet, the semiannual home furnishings trade fair, which took place outside Paris last week, is one of the largest events of its kind in Europe and one of the most influential in terms of what new designs will make it to market.

So it is not surprising that editors of design magazines and others whose work involves understanding the vagaries of the home furnishings market flock to the show — or that, once there, moving among more than 3,000 vendors spread out across 1.3 million square feet of exhibition space, many of them turn for guidance to the so-called Maison et Objet Observatory, a panel of architects, designers, stylists and trend forecasters who regularly produce a book and three product-focused installations for the fair to identify emerging trends.

But this year the theme for the installations was “dreamy.”

Francois Bernard, a Parisian home furnishings forecaster, presented a series of entirely white rooms with very few products from the show. In one room, a white resin sculpture depicted a suite of Louis XV furniture being absorbed by a wall; in another, a ceiling-mounted video screen over a big white bed showed a slowly undulating red whale.

Elizabeth Leriche, a Paris style consultant and designer, tried to “promote new thinking about ways of consumption,” she said, with her observatory exhibit of one-off pieces and limited editions by artist-designers, including a park bench sprouting sinuous wood tendrils and tufted leather blobs that looked like melted furniture.

The one installation that showed a wide variety of products from the fair, by Vincent Gregoire of the Nelly Rodi trend forecasting agency in Paris, was something of a grab bag. It did not go far toward identifying any trend beyond “random combinations,” with its mix of glass vases constrained by metal cages, printed packing tape, large-scale fashion photographs and a pillow showing Margaret Thatcher.

In the absence of much practical direction from the official sources, and given the disparate merchandise visitors had to sort through in a few days (Jan. 25 to 29), the Maison et Objet seemed like a good opportunity to put the discipline of trend forecasting to the test.

Would journalists and forecasters at the show reach a consensus, independent of outside influences, about where things are headed, or would they pick out patterns that suited their own tastes? , looking for “the trends you want to see,” as Michelle Ogundehin, the editor-in-chief of British Elle Decoration, put it?

Ogundehin and four others whose business it is to spot what’s coming next were asked to accompany a reporter on separate rounds of the show and to describe trends they were seeing.

Results of this exercise may surprise skeptics. Choosing different examples and using different words, the five broadly agreed on a few distinct currents in furnishings design and on some reasons behind them.

There were conflicting readings, too, of course, particularly in the realm of color.

But five hours with five forecasters was enough to convince one skeptic that forecasting trends in the design world is as much legitimate discipline as bogus science.

HONESTY

“With what appears to be a recession, people are not moving, so they are not buying lots of furniture,” Ogundehin said early in her tour of the fair. “But they are making smaller purchases to update their houses” — purchases, she believes, that have to do with “value, care, and having things that mean something.”

In design, as in politics, we are apparently ready for things that embody what Ogundehin calls the new honesty. The term seems to refer to visible wood grain, for one thing, and evidence (or at least the suggestion) of the maker’s hand.

As an example, she offered the Orizuru, or paper crane, a sculptural plywood chair from the Japanese Yamagata Koubou workshop, folded like a half-finished piece of origami.

Michelle Lamb, the chairman of Marketing Directions, a forecasting company in Eden Prairie, Minn., that focuses on the home furnishings sector, was drawn to the same features in wood bowls by Friedemann Buhler of Germany.

Buhler’s surprisingly thin bowls, which Lamb described as “the eco trend being expressed freely in found wood,” are an earthy blend of raw materials and refined craftsmanship, with vivid, fingerprint-like grain. Occasional star-shaped cutouts come as a result of removing knots or branches; there are no gratuitous decorative gestures.

Silk panels hand-painted in traditional wallpaper patterns from de Gournay, a British company, also charmed Ogundehin with their artisanal authenticity, as did tiny handmade porcelain bowls from Studio Potomak, a ceramics studio outside Venice.

The “look of the hand” is nowhere more in demand than in the luxury market, said Jean-Philippe Prugnaud, the president of the Mint Group, a buying consultancy with offices in Paris and Milan and retail clients like Saks Fifth Avenue.

He cited a group of little boxes made of metal, bronze, shell and stingray by the Paris designers Ria and Yiouri Augousti, and their new tables with semiprecious stones set into bronze.

At the hipper end of the style spectrum, Prugnaud was drawn to a line of suspension lights made of amorphous porcelain elements hand-molded by the Canadian firm Bocci, which, he said, expressed the same idea.

Libby Sellers, who runs a traveling London design gallery and is a former curator at that city’s Design Museum, also talked about honesty, pointing to the products and packaging of a year-old Danish company called Mater, which proclaims a philosophy of social responsibility based on the 10 principles of the United Nations’ Global Compact.

Sellers also liked a line of outdoor furniture in lacy, powder-coated metal by Patricia Urquiola for Emu, an Italian manufacturer, based on a 1950s design from the company’s archives. “It’s mass-produced,” Sellers said, “but they can add in quirk.”

FANTASY

It is not only through the rigors (or veneer) of honesty, though, that designers are rebelling against sameness and corporate culture; some are resorting to surrealism, observed Sellers.

Zaha Hadid’s hugely overscaled planters for Serralunga, for instance, were nearly as dreamlike as the observatory’s morphing art-furniture. Sellers also offered the example of Lladro, the Spanish ceramics company known for kitschy figurines, which has drawn attention in recent seasons by asking young designers to reinterpret the pieces in its archives.

At Maison et Objet, the Lladro stand displayed a fanciful and somewhat uncanny series of figurines by the British design team Committee, in which a couple is slowly overtaken from head to toe with tiny pastel flowers.

COLOR

“The metallic trend is so prevalent it has almost peaked, but not quite,” Lamb said, pointing out a sofa (unmissable, really) by Aime-Cecil Noury and Pierre Dubois of the French design team Les Heritiers, which was covered in a brushed polyester-vinyl fabric embossed with a damask pattern and printed with silver ink.

Ogundehin agreed: “Last year we wrote about using metallic accents as a way to inject a jolt of gorgeousness into our homes. Now we’re seeing them everywhere, even in upholstery.”

And Prugnaud seemed almost to despair. “Things are so shiny they can’t get any shinier,” he said. “We’re in an age of narcissism. People want to see themselves literally as well as metaphorically in the things they own.”

Despite such definitive statements, metallic turns out not to be the only color idea in the air. Lamb spoke of her attraction to periwinkle-hued glass vessels by Anna Torfs, a Czech designer.

“The combination of purple and gray is an established trend, but we’re nowhere near finished exploring purples,” she said. “I’m looking at red-cast blues, blue reaching out to purple.”

Meanwhile, Caroline Till, a trends analyst with the Future Laboratory, an agency based in London, discerned “a decline in patterning, with large blocks of color and bright primary accents instead.” She said, “I’m seeing a lot of green, almost acidic, primary brights, and fluorescents as accent colors.”

In fact, she added: “I’ve been seeing fuchsia and lime green for a while now. They started last year as accents. Now we’re seeing them used over entire pieces, and often together. It’s fresh and contemporary.”

Bernard, the home furnishings forecaster who has interviewed many consumers about what they want in life, is already looking further ahead.“I’m trying to think what will happen next year, or the next,” he said. “There are a lot of sunny colors now. But in the near future, we’ll have white at home, a blank canvas on which you could write something new for the future.”