An interview with CLAD Global

Father and daughter bamboo builders Elora and John Hardy believe feeling happy and healthy in your home boils down to just one thing: being as close to nature as possible.

The pair, along with a team of designers, architects and craftspeople based in Bali, conceive and create beautiful, fantastical homes from bamboo that are about as far from most modern houses as it’s possible to be.

Their business, called Ibuku, makes homes which are curved, whimsical, tactile and often partly open to the elements. They’re 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,” says John Hardy, speaking from his home in Bali. “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.

“And the toxic crap in so many of our homes,” he continues. “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.”

“The experience that people have in a building is much more important than what it looks like,” adds Elora Hardy. “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.”

Read more over at the CLAD Global site.