Find out how the designer Elora Hardy is inventing a whole new way of building bamboo in Bali’s Green Village
The heavens open as I meet Elora Hardy inside an elegant bamboo building in the centre of the idyllic Indonesian island of Bali, one of many she has designed. Rain hammers on the thatched roof and the grass outside. There are no walls, so the cooling breeze blows across us, carrying the scents of the surrounding jungle. We’re technically inside, but it doesn’t really feel like it. “Isn’t it nice to be sheltered but not separated,” Hardy comments, gazing out into the forest.
Hardy has made a career out of blurring the lines between indoors and outdoors. As creative director of Ibuku, a Bali-based design studio, she has spent years exploring ways to build homes, schools, restaurants, and more out of bamboo, one of the most sustainable building materials on the planet. But these aren’t the traditional, singlestorey bamboo structures you see dotted around Southeast Asia; these are futuristic, curvaceous buildings that appear totally open to the elements. “Some of our buildings look like they’ve been built by aliens,” Hardy says with a laugh.
Many of the outlandish homes Ibuku has designed are clustered in Green Village, a sustainable community nestled in the rainforest outside Ubud, where we’re sitting this morning. Green Village was originally the brainchild of Hardy’s father, John, who founded an eponymous eco-friendly jewellery brand in 1975 before his concern for the environment led him to establish Green School, a non-profit school housed in the largest bamboo building in the world.
“Dad founded Green School and attracted a really amazing group of people to get it built,” Hardy explains. “That was a really intense two-year process of designing and inventing a whole new way of building. No one had built with bamboo on that scale before. Then, when it was finished, what were the team going to do next? There were around 130 people with all these skills and craftsmanship and a whole new vocabulary of how to build and engineer, so it was a natural extension to start thinking about people living nearby in homes that were in the same style as Green School.”
Hardy took charge of this team, which she formalised into the studio Ibuku, and began expanding Green Village, which now has 12 finished homes and a handful more in the works. A stone’s throw from the building where we’re chatting is a prime example of Ibuku’s architecture, River House. A four-storey family home that seems to tumble down the valley towards the Ayung River, it looks like something out of the James Cameron film Avatar. The rooms are connected by gently curving staircases that seem to float in the air, while soaring above the house is a thatched roof held up by thick bamboo poles. From above, the roof looks like a huge leaf.
Ibuku’s houses might appear rustic, but they’re not devoid of creature comforts. Most of the bedrooms in the Green Village houses have air-conditioning (glass panels are easily slid into place to keep the cool air indoors) and all have electricity and plumbing, though many of the bathrooms are at least partly outdoors.
“These houses are not what many people are used to,” Hardy says. “But I’ve found that when people step into a room that doesn’t have walls, they often feel really at home. I think humans spent a lot more time evolving in natural spaces and spaces like caves [than in buildings], so I’ve found that the more organically shaped rooms are, the more relaxed and refreshed people feel. I don’t think it’s that different from what people feel when they walk into a beautiful grove of trees.”