Green schools and eco-developments – the Bali eco-phenomenon.

When it opened last year, the Green School in Bali was met with a mixture of admiration, astonishment and incredulity. The massive, cathedral-like bamboo buildings, some of them three storeys high and as long as 50 meters, set in eight hectares of rainforest along the Ayung River south of Ubud, certainly made a statement. Now investors can benefit from the launch of Green Village next door, the world’s first super-deluxe bamboo villa development.

John Hardy is mightily miffed with Al Gore. “That guy completely turned my life upside down,” he jokes, “all because of that damn film!” What he refers to, of course, is An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary that kick-started the climate change debate and led to Gore’s transformation from ex-VP has-been to Nobel Prize-winning revolutionary.

Hardy, the founder of the world-wide jewellery empire (since sold) that bears his name, found himself with the time, the means and the opportunity to heed Gore’s call to arms. And what, especially with two young children, could be better than to establish a school? A green school, where children from all over the world could come and learn, in a totally natural environment, how to become the future stewards of our planet, the green leaders of tomorrow. So John and his wife Cynthia set out, with the same grit and determination and sheer chutzpah that helped them create one of the world’s most successful jewellery businesses, to create Green School.

Now, in the middle of Green School’s second year of operations, over a hundred children from 20 countries, including 20 Balinese children on scholarships, congregate to learn, share, play and make general mayhem in the mud fields after school. All this happens under the watchful eye of Ronald Stones (OBE) and Andy Dalton, the director and principal, respectively, of the school.

The curriculum follows both the Cambridge IGSCE and the IB paths; your basic maths, English, the sciences and so on are exactly the same as they would be if you were in Melbourne or Hong Kong. Some of the courses, however, are highly unusual, though fully accredited. The main one of these is Green Studies, which covers agriculture, energy, waste treatment, animal care, sustainable development and construction.

Last year, the older kids built a club house – all  from bamboo, of course. Staff members from PT Bambu, John Hardy’s eco-construction business, were on hand to advise but not to participate. The whole thing took two months. John says that now, when he goes into an old church or a castle with his daughters, they immediately scan the roofs and arches for load-bearing points and weight distribution, making knowing comments about proportions and light.

It’s the same with agriculture; these children learn how to harvest rice, how to build a dam, how to generate electricity. But they don’t study how to build a house; they learn how to build a house by building a house. This is why people come here from Singapore and Sydney and Stockholm, sometimes resigning from their jobs and renting out their houses, as necessary, to give their children a year or three to experience Green School.

As people come from all over the world to put their children in Green School, it was a bit contradictory to have the children attending school in a completely sustainable environment while their families lived in concrete boxes in Seminyak, and so the idea of Green Village was born. Hardy approached Nils Wetterlind, the founder of Tropical Homes, a long-standing developer on the island, with the idea of building sustainable houses on a piece of riverfront land he had secured nearby. Wetterlind, who had pioneered the use of solar panels and reclaimed timber into his Bali projects over the years, was keen to take the next step: to build houses that were not only completely ecologically sustainable, but also comfortable and luxurious.

“I am an armchair ecologist,” says Wetterlind. “In other words, like everyone else I am all for ecology and sustainability as long as I don’t have to compromise my own comfort or convenience. We’re all spoilt, selfish and lazy. And greedy. So let’s face it: the world won’t become more sustainable because it should. It will become sustainable when the green technologies become better, and cheaper, than conventional, polluting  technologies. Imposing austerity and discomfort simply doesn’t work.”

As it turns out, bamboo houses are both stronger and less costly to build than houses made of concrete and steel. Put simply, bamboo, which grows to maturity in five years (as opposed to 30 for conventional timber), can be used in three forms: natural, engineered and strand-woven.

In its natural form, as used for the amazing buildings of Green School, bamboo is incredibly strong and supple and suitable for large, complex structures. For interiors, though, you need higher-density materials; for floors and walls, you use something called engineered bamboo. This is thinly sliced, treated bamboo that is glued together under great pressure to form what looks like solid timber. This becomes a beautifully textured and incredibly strong material which, when properly treated, lasts indefinitely. It’s not cheap; it’s on a par with commercially available timber from the rapidly diminishing rainforests.

And finally, the Chinese have invented strand-woven bamboo, which is bamboo pulped, spun into threads (strands), woven together rather like sheets of glass fibre and compressed into moulds to form window frames, planks, or whatever you want. These are the three materials that are used to build the houses at Green Village; no bricks, no concrete, no rainforest timber.

Having its own energy from solar, micro-hydroelectric, LPG and WTE (waste-to-energy) sources means that the homes at Green Village can be lavishly air-conditioned without using highly polluting, brown coal-generated electricity from the (distinctly unreliable) national grid. The homes also come with individual spa baths, fully fitted kitchens and top-of-the-range electronics and LED lighting, creating a Four Seasons-style comfort without compromising on ecological principals.

Asia is full of resorts built with rainforest timbers and tons of concrete that have the gall to call themselves sustainable because they serve organic salad in the restaurant and offer yoga classes. But at Green Village you get the genuine article: total luxury in a totally sustainable environment.

Green Village has a large, riverfront swimming pool, several gazebos scattered along the river, a restaurant, offices for the use of the residents who need workspace and business facilities, and a central laundry and kitchens. It  comes with full management and letting services for those who can’t live full-time in Bali.

Properties are available on a leasehold or freehold basis, with prices starting at US$250,000; a fraction of what you would pay for a concrete box surrounded by a 6-metre-high perimeter wall in a Seminyak development. As land along the Ayung River becomes more and more scarce, and the traffic, pollution and overcrowding of Seminyak gets worse every year, a totally natural home in a beautiful setting on the Ayung River could be an appealing investment.

Find out more at the Expat Realtor property soirée on 24 February. Click here for details.

www.greenschool.org
www.tropicalhomesbali.com