Indonesia: Bali – The Green Village

🎋 Built From Canes: A Day at the Green Village, Near Ubud, Bali

Our mission for the day started based on a television show we’d seen a few years back. On Apple TV there’s a documentary series called Home, which we’d worked our way through over several evenings — each episode profiles a single remarkable house somewhere in the world, following the architecture, the architect behind it, and the particular human story that brought the building into existence in the first place. It’s the sort of programme that makes you feel briefly cultured and then immediately restless. One episode featured a house in Bali built entirely from bamboo — not decoratively, not as a feature wall or an accent piece, but properly, structurally, the whole extraordinary thing — and it moved in a way that houses generally aren’t supposed to move, curving and sweeping like something that had grown rather than been constructed. 

We asked our driver Wayan, who had by this point become our principal source of local knowledge and quiet patience in the face of our tourist whims. He thought it was probably something called the Green Village, out near Sibang Gede, a small village a few kilometres south-west of Ubud, though he wasn’t entirely sure what the public access situation was. We decided to turn up and see what happened, which is, we’ve found, usually the most efficient approach to these things.

🏫 An Unexpected Detour Into the Green School

What we found first, as it turned out, was not the Green Village at all but the Green School — a related enterprise, sharing the same philosophy and the same extraordinary building material, but quite a different proposition altogether.

The Green School has a founding story that reads like the plot of a certain kind of earnest documentary. In 1975, a Canadian jewellery designer named John Hardy arrived in Bali, fell completely in love with the island, and eventually made it his permanent home. He built up a successful jewellery business there over the following decades, became deeply embedded in Balinese culture, and by the mid-2000s was growing increasingly concerned about what the future of the place he loved might look like. Then, in 2006, he watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth — a film that had that effect on rather a lot of people that year — and something clicked. He also had children, and the local schooling options did not particularly inspire him. The logical response, clearly, was to build one from scratch. Not a conventional school in a convenient existing building. A school in the jungle, beside the Ayung River, made almost entirely from bamboo, on a twenty-acre site that he would design as an ecosystem as much as an institution.

The Ayung River, incidentally, is not some decorative trickle. It’s the longest river in Bali, sacred in the Hindu Balinese tradition, and it runs through a deep and frankly spectacular canyon of tropical forest to the south-west of Ubud. Hardy picked his spot deliberately.

The school that emerged from all of this opened its doors in September 2008 with ninety students. By the time we visited, it had grown to well over five hundred children drawn from more than forty countries — a genuinely international community that had ended up in the jungle outside Ubud apparently because their parents, like us, had seen something extraordinary and followed the impulse.

The buildings are unlike any school buildings we’ve ever seen, and between us we’ve seen rather a lot of school buildings of the depressing institutional variety. There are no corridors. No concrete. No fluorescent lighting humming ominously overhead. The campus is a collection of open-sided bamboo pavilions set among the trees, connected by paths, with the Ayung River audible throughout. The centrepiece is a structure known as the Heart of School — a sixty-metre-long curved building made from over two thousand five hundred bamboo poles, which swept over the landscape in a way that felt more like a wave than a building. There was also a bridge, twenty-two metres long, spanning the river in bamboo. We stood and looked at it for quite some time.

The school generated all its own energy from a combination of solar panels and, rather impressively, a hydroelectric vortex turbine set into the river — a spinning cylinder of water that produced electricity from the river’s natural flow without damming it or disrupting it in any meaningful way. The whole campus had been designed by a firm called Ibuku, which was founded by Hardy’s daughter Elora, who grew up on the island and absorbed her father’s philosophy so thoroughly that she went on to make bamboo architecture her life’s work. The school had won the Zayed Future Energy Prize, had been the subject of its own documentary, and was routinely cited internationally as a demonstration that sustainable architecture could be beautiful, functional and genuinely inspiring rather than merely well-intentioned and slightly worthy

Sadly, the Green School can only be visited by appointment, and my lack of planning meant we didn’t have one – but close by is the Green Village – built for families whose children attended the Green School – so that is where we headed next.

🏡 Into the Green Village

The Green Village was, in essence, the residential arm of the same family of ideas. Where the Green School demonstrated what bamboo could do for education, the Green Village demonstrated what it could do for somewhere you’d actually want to live. It sat on the terraced hillside above the Ayung River valley, immediately adjacent to the school, and consisted of somewhere between twelve and eighteen individual villas — the number shifted depending on what was under construction at any given moment — each one designed and built by Ibuku to be entirely unlike its neighbours.

This mattered, because the standard criticism of sustainable or eco-architecture was that it tended to be a bit samey. Earnest. Brown. Slightly smug. The Green Village was none of those things. Every house was a different shape, a different size, a different response to its particular position on the hillside. Some were intimate two-bedroom retreats. Others were multi-storey family compounds that would comfortably house an extended family with room for the in-laws and a decent library. All of them were made from bamboo — treated with a borax solution that protected against insects and moisture, and which went some way towards addressing the historically fraught cultural status of bamboo as a building material in Indonesia.

This was worth a moment’s pause, because it mattered to understanding what the Green Village represented. For many Indonesians, bamboo had long been associated with poverty — it was what rural families built with before they could afford concrete and brick, the material of necessity rather than choice. Persuading a culture to see the same material as aspirational, even luxurious, was no small task. The approach Ibuku took was essentially to build things so beautiful and so technically accomplished that the old associations became impossible to sustain. It seemed, on the evidence in front of us, to be working.

We arrived, in the way that we reliably manage on holidays, just slightly too late for the thing we most wanted to do, which was a workshop tour of the Bamboo Pure factory next door, where the raw bamboo poles were treated, shaped and transformed into building materials. Mildly irritating. However, the Green Village also offered a separate guided tour of two of the completed houses themselves, and we were in time for that, so we booked ourselves in.

The entry fee came with a snack — banana fritters and Balinese tea — which was normally taken after the tour. We did it beforehand, partly because we had time and partly because we were slightly hungry, which felt pleasingly subversive without actually being subversive in any meaningful way whatsoever.

🌿 Two Houses, One Guide, and Nobody Else

We then discovered that we were the only people on the tour. Just the two of us and our guide, which is either slightly awkward or completely brilliant depending on your personality. We were, mercifully, the sort of people who found it completely brilliant, and so off we went.

The first house was the newer of the two, and you could see it in the finishes — everything still sharp-edged and recently completed, the bamboo a warm, clean golden colour that the older structures had mellowed beyond. Downstairs was a large open-plan living space: light, generously proportioned, beautifully made. Every surface — ceiling, walls, staircase, furniture, fittings — was bamboo, and the craftsmanship throughout was genuinely outstanding. This was not the work of people approximating a building. This was precise, considered, skilled construction that happened to be using an unconventional material.

Unlike some of the more dramatically open-sided structures on the site, this house had glass panels to enclose it from the outside air, which was partly practical — air conditioning worked better when the air stayed inside — and partly protective against the local wildlife, which in tropical Bali had firm opinions about domestic interiors. Upstairs were two bedrooms. Outside was a small private pool and a garden that felt properly secluded, the surrounding vegetation thick enough to give a genuine sense of being in the jungle rather than merely adjacent to it.

The second house was something else entirely.

🌀 The One That Made Us Seriously Consider Our Life Choices

If the first house was impressive, the second was the kind of thing that made you stand in a doorway with your mouth open and then feel slightly embarrassed about it. It was a three-bedroom house in the same way that certain large houses elsewhere in the world were technically three-bedroom houses — which was to say, the bedroom count did not begin to convey the scale of the thing.

The central living space was cavernous. The bamboo structure rose and curved overhead in great arching poles, and a sweeping internal staircase led up to a mezzanine platform that the owners used as an office or reading area. Unlike the first house, this one had no glass walls at all. It was open on all sides to the surrounding jungle, which was either magnificently liberating or somewhat alarming depending on how you felt about the insect kingdom having unrestricted access to your sitting room. We were in the former camp, just about, though I’ll admit I looked at the ceiling a couple of times with what I would describe as professional interest.

The open-sided design was, apparently, intentional for structural as well as philosophical reasons. Bamboo construction at this scale worked best when air could move through it freely — enclosing it created pressure differentials and condensation issues that weren’t problems in an open structure. There was also something rather pleasing about the idea that the building was genuinely part of its environment rather than a sealed box dropped into it. Whether this philosophy held up at three in the morning when something large and enthusiastic was navigating your ceiling I couldn’t say with complete confidence.

The bedrooms were in a separate annexe connected to the main house by a covered bridge, which gave the whole arrangement a slightly Tolkien-esque quality — the kind of place where you’d half expect someone in a cloak to appear from the treeline and ask you a cryptic question. Each bedroom was generously sized, had its own en-suite bathroom, and came equipped with the practical reassurances of mosquito nets over the beds and ceiling fans. Outside, a large pool occupied a terrace at the edge of the hillside, and beyond it the Ayung River valley fell away in a cascade of deep green tropical vegetation — a canyon of jungle dropping to the river far below, with the sound of water coming up from somewhere you couldn’t quite see. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, spectacular. I was already, quietly and with studied casualness, trying to work out what Airbnb prices for places like this tended to look like, and whether there was a figure that could be described as merely eye-watering rather than categorically impossible.

There wasn’t, really. But it’s a nice thought.

💭 Reflections

We hadn’t planned any of this. We’d set out looking for a bamboo house we’d seen in a television programme, found a school by accident, wandered into a residential compound via the goodwill of a security guard, eaten banana fritters in the wrong order, and ended up standing on a terrace above the Ayung River wondering whether we could justify it as a work trip.

What stayed with us, genuinely, was not just the beauty of the buildings — though they were beautiful, in a way that was hard to put down to any single design decision — but the sense that something here had worked. The Green School and the Green Village together represented an argument: that the materials and approaches we associate with poverty or compromise could be transformed, with enough skill and commitment, into something extraordinary. That argument wasn’t made through any press release or mission statement. It was made through the buildings themselves, which was the only way such arguments were ever really convincing.

John Hardy arrived in Bali in 1975 as a jewellery designer and ended up building a school in the jungle. His daughter Elora grew up and turned bamboo into architecture that won international prizes. Wayan drove us there on the basis of a half-remembered guess. We went because of a documentary series we’d been watching on rainy evenings at home.

None of this was planned. It rarely is, in our experience, when something turns out to be worth seeing.