Eco Watch

Much ado about bamboo. On Bali, a humble harvest yield style and sustainability.

I am standing in what could well be the largest bamboo building in the world. More precisely, I am clinging to a flimsy scaffold 15 meters above the ground, enveloped by a web of crisscrossing bamboo struts that cascades down from one of three bamboo towers. This is the Three Mountains Factory, the latest low-impact structure to grace John Hardy’s base of operations in the village of Mambal, deep in the cultural heartland of Bali. To describe the Canadian-born jewelry designer’s HQ as whimsical would be an understatement: the ground boast cobblestone paths, patches of iridescent rice, arbors spilling passionflowers, a babbling brook, and a hodgepodge of buildings variously constructed from bamboo, mud, and thatch. You hold expect a hobbit to come ambling out of one of the little doorways.

Take The High Road

Beyond its impressive physical attributes – rice paddies, thundering surf, volcanoes, monsoon forests – Bali is famed for its multi-hued kaleidoscope of arts, culture, and religion.

The Balinese use the catchall term adat (in fact a word with Arabic root) to describe their densely layered religio-cultural life. It means something like tradition, but better captures the sinuous, celebratory interplay between sacred and secular that is the island’s social motor. If Bali is a kaleidoscope, then Ubud is geographically and metaphorically its central prism – the much touted “artistic and cultural hub” where Art (capital intended) collides with craft and all manner of bohemians, eccentrics, autocrats, altruists, hippies, and creatives form a cosmopolitan patchwork that is little more stitched to local culture than in resort enclaves elsewhere in Bali.