Elora Hardy

Elora Hardy (born 1980) is a Canadian designer, who founded the company IBUKU. She is most well known for designing (along with her team IBUKU and her father John Hardy) a community of bamboo homes near Denpasar in Bali. She was born in Canada, grew up in Bali and moved to the United States at the age of 14 to go to boarding school. Since that time Ibuku has built more than 90 bamboo structures in Southeast Asia and Africa, including the Green School Bali campus. Hardy created a yoga pavilion and riverside cooking classroom at the Four Seasons in Bali, the interior design of Tri restaurant in Hong Kong, furniture for the Como Marketplace in Singapore and tree-house suites at Bambu Indah.

For her work on bamboo buildings, Hardy was named an Architectural Digest Innovator in 2013. In 2015 she gave a TED Talk about her building projects titled “Magical houses, made of bamboo”.

Biography Elora Hardy was born in 1980 in Canada to artistic parents Penny Berton and John Hardy. They settled in Bali, Indonesia in the 1970s and Elora grew up and was surrounded with craftsmen and women from the village and other areas surrounding it. She was taught by these craftsmen and women how to carve, paint, and batik, an Indonesian style of dyeing whole cloths that is wax resistant. Her childhood creations consisted primarily of princesses and fairies, and she was also given the freedom to design and decorate her own room. When her mother asked her to draw her dream house, she drew a fairy house that looked more like a mushroom that had windows and a door built onto it.

Hardy's mother Penny Berton was a jewelry designer who worked with local goldsmiths to create hand-carved artworks. Hardy's grandfather was Canadian author Pierre Berton. In the 1990s her father, John Hardy, along with his second wife Cynthia Hardy founded a successful international jewelry company John Hardy.

During her young adult life, Hardy moved to the United States and spent 14 years living there. She first lived in California at Idyllwild Arts Academy, a boarding school for the arts. Later, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2004. The following year, Hardy moved to Manhattan, New York that grow in abundance and at an extremely fast rate. Certain species of these bamboo shoots can grow from two inches an hour to one and half meters per day. They are able to mature within 4 years to become a structural column, and as a bonus, they easily grow back for many years without the need for caring or maintenance which makes it that much more sustainable. These are just some of the benefits of the use of bamboo in modern architecture and what it could mean for the future of materials used in construction.

Bamboo shoot is distinct in its variety of forms and uses. It inspired Hardy's flexibility and creativity in solving architectural challenges and restrictions, resulting in unique designs.