Once seen mainly in Chinese scroll paintings and in the mouths of cuddly pandas, bamboo is soaring to fashionable new heights across the design world these days.
A highly regenerative and thus sustainable resource loved by environmentalists, bamboo is actually a grass and the fastest-growing natural building material on our planet. Growing three times faster than trees, it is capable of topping 15 metres in 18 months.
Unlike timber from felled trees, which must mature for 30 years or more to be a viable building material, bamboo can be harvested as timber after three to five years of growth.
It also offers impressive tensile strength that outperforms even steel.
'Bamboo shoots out of the ground like a train,' says Bali-based jeweller John Hardy at his residential compound built from salvaged wood above the Ayung River in the island's lush interior.
A relatively new convert to bamboo, which he calls 'endlessly sustainable', Hardy plans to make a second career of bringing bamboo design to the world as he has done with Balinese traditional silvercraft.