Elora Hardy and the Bamboo Homes of Bali’s Green Village

Bamboo Architecture at Bali's Green Village

Ibuku

Elora Hardy is a Bali-raised designer who left a career in fashion in New York to build houses almost entirely out of bamboo. Through her design and build company, Ibuku, she and a team of Balinese architects, engineers and craftspeople have created curving, open-sided homes, bridges and even bathrooms in the jungle near Ubud, including the much-photographed cluster of houses known as Green Village. The short film below gives a walk-through of the buildings, ending with a house shaped like an opening lotus flower.

Here is the story behind those homes, why bamboo is such an interesting building material, and what it can and can't do.

From New York fashion to the Balinese jungle

Hardy grew up on Bali. After studying fine art, she went to New York and worked as a print designer for the fashion house Donna Karan. In 2009 she returned to the island, drawn back by a project her family had already started.

Her father, the jewellery designer John Hardy, and her stepmother, Cynthia Hardy, had founded the Green School, an international school whose campus is built largely from bamboo. Its central building, a vast spiral of bamboo columns and woven roof, showed that the material could be used for big, ambitious structures, not just huts and fences. Elora saw the possibilities and founded Ibuku to design and build with bamboo, starting with homes.

(Some older reports of her story, including the one this page first shared, called her "Laura" Hardy. Her name is Elora.)

What makes the Green Village homes different

The houses look nothing like a conventional villa. Floors flow into stairs, roofs swoop down into walls, and many rooms are open to the forest on several sides. Because bamboo poles are hollow, flexible and naturally curved, the buildings tend towards organic shapes rather than boxes.

Bamboo is used for almost everything: structural columns and beams, floors, railings, doors, and much of the furniture. Few rooms have conventional glass windows; instead, the design relies on deep roof overhangs and the cooling breeze through open sides, which suits Bali's hot, humid climate and cuts the need for air conditioning.

In the film, Hardy explains that the team started out with a decision to build only with materials they felt good about. In her TED talk she adds that they have had to invent our own rules, because no standard building code is written for a jungle house made of curved bamboo. Since no two bamboo poles are identical, each structure is effectively one of a kind.

The short film featuring Elora Hardy and the bamboo homes of Green Village. The lotus-shaped house appears near the end.

How a bamboo house is designed and built

Ibuku's buildings are hard to draw on a flat sheet of paper. Hardy has described in interviews and in her TED talk how the team works from detailed physical scale models made of thin bamboo strips. Builders measure from these models directly, which lets them translate complex curves into a full-size structure.

The process usually involves a few key steps:

Choosing the right species and poles. Different bamboo species suit different jobs, from thick structural columns to thin strips for weaving and furniture.
Harvesting at maturity. Poles cut at the right age, and at the right season when sap sugars are low, are stronger and less attractive to insects.
Treating the poles. Untreated bamboo is a favourite food of beetles and termites. Builders commonly soak or infuse poles with a salt solution, often borax-based, to protect them.
Keeping it dry. The single biggest rule in bamboo construction is to keep the poles off the ground and out of the rain. Concrete or stone footings and generous roofs do that job.

Is bamboo really a sustainable "super-plant"?

Bamboo deserves much of its reputation. It is a grass, not a tree, and some species are among the fastest-growing plants on Earth, with recorded growth of close to a metre in a single day during the growing season. Strength-for-weight, good structural bamboo compares well with timber, and some species have very high tensile strength.

A common claim, repeated in the version of this story we first published, is that bamboo is "fully mature in three years". The reality is a little more nuanced. Culms (the individual stems) are generally ready for construction somewhere between about three and seven years after they emerge, depending on species. Harvesting a mature culm does not kill the plant, because the underground rhizome keeps sending up new shoots, which is a real advantage over felling a tree that took decades to grow.

Bamboo plantations also absorb carbon as they grow. But "sustainable" depends on the whole picture: how the bamboo is farmed, how far it travels, how it is treated, and how long the building lasts. A bamboo house that rots in ten years because it was poorly protected is not a green success. Ibuku's approach of sourcing locally, treating poles carefully and designing to keep water off the structure is what makes the material work.

The challenges of building with bamboo

Bamboo is not a miracle material. Builders who use it face a few well-known problems:

Durability. Bamboo left in contact with soil or exposed to rain breaks down quickly. Careful detailing and maintenance are essential.
Pests. Without treatment, insects can hollow out poles from the inside.
Variability. Every pole has its own diameter, wall thickness and curve, which makes standard engineering calculations harder.
Codes and insurance. Many countries have limited building standards for bamboo, so large projects may need specialist engineering approval.
Privacy and comfort. Open-sided homes are magical in the tropics but would be impractical in a cold or urban setting.

None of this cancels the appeal. It simply explains why the most successful bamboo buildings come from teams with years of hands-on experience, as in Bali.

What the rest of us can take from it

Most people will never live in a bamboo treehouse, but Hardy's work carries a few ideas that apply far more widely. Use materials that grow close to where you build. Design for the local climate instead of fighting it. And treat a building as something that should feel connected to its surroundings, not sealed off from them.

If you would like to go further, her TED talk is a ten-minute tour of the buildings and the thinking behind them. Ibuku's projects have since spread beyond homes to hotels, bridges and public spaces, and Green Village remains the best-known showcase of what the material can do.

Sources: Photo: Ibuku; Elora Hardy, “Magical houses, made of bamboo”, TED2015; Wikipedia: Bamboo; originally shared via True Activist.

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