Woman left successful career in New York to build sustainable bamboo houses
Elora Hardy and her father John Hardy believe that you can be happy and healthy in your home when it’s the closest possible to nature. So even when Elora had a successful career in the NY fashion scene, she left to build bamboo houses in Indonesia.
Elora and her father the Canadian jewelry designer with a team of designers, architects, and craftspeople based in Bali started to work together and create beautiful, impressive homes from bamboo.
It was built as close as possible to nature.
Their business called Ibuku makes curved, whimsical and magical homes that are extremely close to nature—inside the forest itself. The homes are highly sustainable and each one is unique in design. That means we won’t have different houses with the same design.
“Living in a box is death to the people. We evolved to walk on the earth, not on perfectly flat, industrial floors. Modern homes are full of right angles—they’re not life-enhancing. Look at the beauty in the world. There are no right angles,” said John.
The houses were built without destroying the nature around it. Look at how they kept the coconut trunk and built the roof around it.
“And the toxic crap in so many of our homes. What are we doing to ourselves and the planet? We don’t use right angles in the homes we build. We take our cues from nature and traditional indigenous buildings. The floors in our homes are often slightly ridged— they’re amazing. You wake up and you just feel happy,” told John.
“The experience that people have in a building is much more important than what it looks like. The most powerful thing for people to get from the spaces we build is a feeling of optimism, that there’s hope and possibility and magic in the world,” added Elora.
The design was very intricate with beautiful architecture.
Sunlight penetrates the wall and creates such a magical ambiance.
They even have a pool near the bamboo house.
In 2007, John and his wife Cynthia founded Bali’s Green School—a pioneering, open-air school built from locally sourced bamboo teaching sustainability and traditional curriculum. It aims to inspire the green leaders of the future and educate them in the latest environmental thinking.
Later John and Elora built the Green Village, a community of 12 unique private bamboo homes surrounded by lush forest. It is also just within a walking distance from the Green School.
The bathroom might make you want to take your bath longer than usual.
The table was made to perfection.
It looks even more surreal at night.
Spent the last 5 years revolutionizing bamboo construction believing that it is an unused but ideal renewable resource, the Hardy team uses boron that occurs naturally in nature to treat the bamboo and make it indigestible to insects.
Having the strength-to-weight ratio of steel and can regenerate itself in just a few years, bamboo has the compressive force of concrete and can last a lifetime if treated well.
It looks straight out of a fairytale!
