After graduating, she worked in the fashion industry for five years, designing clothes that were worn by models on the runway and featured in many famous magazines.
In 2007 his parents, John Hardy and Cynthia, planted a bamboo forest in their hometown of Bali, and it wasn’t long before the bamboo trees grew taller.
Probably because of her parents’ influence, she quit her job in 2010 and went back to her hometown (Green Village, Ayung Valley Eco-village, Bali, Indonesia) to build a bamboo house. Together with the artists, architects, engineers and craftspeople who helped her father build his green school, and herself, she started a bamboo construction company called Ibuku, with the intention of shaking up the construction industry on the island of Paris and in the tropics with bamboo.
Elora Hardy still feels that the performance of bamboo is underestimated by designers, saying, “With creativity and hard work, you really can build unique, beautiful, comfortable, safe, and even luxurious houses out of bamboo.”
So far Elora Hardy and its team have completed over 40 unique bamboo structures, large and small, that blend harmoniously with the local landscape. All are locally sourced and built 20% through her team using traditional methods.
One of her most famous works is Sharma Springs, a 6-storey, 750 square meter bamboo house located halfway up the hill overlooking the Ayung River Valley. The building is constructed almost entirely of bamboo wood, with the entrance leading directly into the open-air living room, dining room and kitchen on the fourth floor through a fantastical tunnel-like bridge.
Not only is bamboo used as a building material, but the interior space is also played with, with floors, furniture, toiletries and even cutlery, the whole space is scented with the natural freshness of bamboo. For example, bamboo can be woven into interior partitions that are both strong and lightweight, and bent into a kind of primitive revolving door.
With the compressive strength of concrete and the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, some types of bamboo are flexible and stretchable in thousands of ways, and can be pressed, flattened, sliced or carved. This simple, effective, readily available and flexible bamboo material can easily create a variety of free flowing forms in the same construction and can be well integrated into stone foundations. Here are some of Ibuku’s other works to get a feel for.
