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.
[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.
[12] Elora's mother Penny Berton was a jewelry designer who worked with local goldsmiths to create hand-carved artworks.
[14] The following year, Elora moved to Manhattan, New York[3] where she found her way into becoming a print designer at the Donna Karan Collection and subsequently the famous DKNY brand.
In 2010, Elora decided to move back to Indonesia to join her father and a group of artisans and home designers to build bamboo houses.
The demand for environmentally friendly homes grew so much that her father found it as an opportunity to put his skills and ideas into action.
[12] Elora found that there was potential in bamboo as material for building due to its ecological durability and extreme strength in many ways.
She emphasizes how it would mean that every step of treating the bamboo must be done carefully and every aspect of its use into the design must be considered in order to maintain its durability and strength, extending the period of completing a project.
Elora finds it as a good opportunity to become a flexible designer having to not just adjust the bamboo but her ideas as well until it all falls into place; it even comes out better than what they started with.
In this case, bamboo can’t bend the way one would want it to and neither did Elora study architecture which would have hindered her from creatively designing buildings like it has done to some architects.