Elora Hardy (born 1980) is a Canadian designer, who founded the company IBUKU.[1][2][3] 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.[4][5] 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.[3] She then got a degree in fine arts and worked in the fashion industry where she most notably designed prints for Donna Karan. In 2010 Hardy moved back to Bali and founded Ibuku, a design firm that uses bamboo and other natural materials to build homes and structures.[4] 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.[6]
For her work on bamboo buildings Hardy was named an Architectural Digest Innovator in 2013.[7] In 2015 she gave a TED Talk about her building projects titled “Magical houses, made of bamboo”, it has four million views as of early 2019.[8][9]