Elora Hardy quits her job in the New York fashion scene to start building magnificent structures of bamboo houses in Bali, Indonesia. Together with her Canadian jewelry designer father, John Hardy, they believe that people can be happy and healthy in their home when it’s the closest possible to nature.
The father and daughter duo, along with a team of talented designers, architects, and craftspeople based in Bali worked together to create beautiful, impressive homes made from bamboo.
Elora and her father’s business is called Ibuku, makes homes which are curved, whimsical, tactile, and are extremely close to nature. The homes are also highly sustainable and each one is unique in design and inspired by the natural world.
“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,” John said.
They built these houses without destroying the nature around it. Just look at how they kept the coconut trunk and built the roof around it.
The interior of the house is an object lesson in the infinite adaptability of bamboo and looks just equally impressive as the exterior. Its doors also look better than any door you’ve seen before.
These bamboo houses look even more surreal at night.
“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,” he continued.
“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,” Elora added.
John and his wife Cynthia founded Bali’s Green School in 2007. It is a pioneering, open-air school built from locally sourced bamboo that teaches sustainability and traditional curriculum. They aim to inspire the green leaders of the future and educate them in the latest environmental thinking.
Eventually, his daughter Elora joined them in building the Green Village, a community of 12 luxurious and unique private bamboo homes surrounded by lush Balinese forest, which is only walking distance from the Green School.
The Hardy team uses boron that occurs naturally in nature to treat the bamboo and make it indigestible to insects. They spent the last 5 years revolutionizing bamboo construction, believing that it is an unused but ideal renewable resource.
They also believe that bamboo was the future of sustainable building material because bamboo is flexible, light and strong, with the compressive force of concrete and the same strength-to-weight ratio as steel.
Aside from that, it can also regenerate itself in just a few years and absorbs more carbon dioxide than softwood trees. Although damage from insects and moisture are its primary weaknesses, it can last a lifetime if treated well.
source: gtgoodtimes