After being horrified by Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former jeweler John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia decided that instead of succumbing to climate change anxiety, they would combat it firsthand by creating a better, more thriving world.
They opened the Green School in Bali in 2008 with 90 students (now upwards of 740), where sustainable ideas are the focus of the curriculum. In 2010, John’s daughter Elora joined him to head up sustainable architecture firm and bamboo innovator Ibuku, helping to build Green Village, a sustainable masterplanned community with 14 private, bespoke homes and villas located about a half mile from the school that fit into the contours of the land. “They’re often whimsical and dynamic, and people are surprised they feel at home in these curving spaces,” she says.
Much like the Green School, Green Village is “almost exclusively bamboo,” says Elora, a signature design material for the Hardys, as it encapsulates their very mission: It’s fast growing, durable (it can withstand earthquakes), and can be shaped and formed into unique structures that blend with the surroundings. “Bamboo is a mind bender,” explains Elora. “It’s curving, it tapers, it’s hollow. It has extreme strength in dynamic ways.” The buildings often look as if they were molded by nature because, in some ways, they were. “There’s this sense that they grew or were meant to grow that way,” she adds.
Along with a yoga pavilion in the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan, Ibuku has recently embarked on projects outside the island, including Tri restaurant in Hong Kong and Como Marketplace in Singapore. With 70-plus bamboo buildings to its name, the firm continues to expand John and Cynthia’s eco-luxury boutique hotel Bambu Indah with the newly opened rooms, the crescent-shaped Moon House and the curvaceous Copper House. The hotel is a project he envisioned when he bought the land in 2005 so it wouldn’t be overbuilt “with ugly structures,” he explains. “It’s the antithesis of corporate America hotels. People come here because they’ve had enough of that.”
This idea of being firmly rooted and embraced by nature drives much of John and Elora’s ambitious concepts. From the beautiful curving buildings at Green School to the cozy homes in Green Village to the twisting and intertwined houses at Bambu Indah, people “feel more alive inside our buildings,” she says. Indeed, they are throwing out the box and the ego behind design and building spaces that “feel like they’re already part of the world,” she says. Adds John: “Elora builds for the people. That’s magic, and it is in harmony with the site and in harmony with the person.”
As they continue to transcend the idea of the built environment, the question for John and Elora remains how do they convince people that their ecological mindset, bamboo structures, and longterm sustainable ideas are worth the investment? The luxury of feeling the breeze on your skin and the way the light falls across the room because of how the bamboo is angled is the “magic you get,” she says. That’s what makes it worth it. “When you wake up in a bamboo building,” says John, “you’re happy.”
