About
Builders Who Became Pro Clima Distributors
We Started on the Tools
Scholten Group began as a building company. Stewart and Cameron Scholten are brothers and licensed builders, and for years the work was what you would expect of a residential builder in the Northern Rivers: new homes, renovations, extensions, mostly around Ballina and Byron.
What changed things was a growing interest in how buildings actually perform once people are living in them. Not the finish or the fit-out, but the parts nobody sees. Where moisture goes. Where air leaks. Why some houses in this climate develop mould in the wall cavity within five years and others never do.
That interest turned into Passive House training, and Passive House training turned into a different kind of building business. Both brothers hold Passive House trade certification. Working to that standard means the building envelope stops being a detail you resolve on site and becomes the thing the whole project is organised around.
The Ballina Passive House
In Ballina, near the Richmond River, we built a certified Passive House on a heptagonal block at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was one of the first certified Passive Houses in the Northern Rivers.
The airtightness result was 0.1 air changes per hour at 50 pascals. For context, a conventional Australian home typically tests somewhere between 10 and 20. The building is a timber frame with bulk insulation, wrapped in structural OSB-3, sealed with an adhesive airtight barrier, then covered with continuous woodfibre insulation and a ventilated cavity behind the cladding. According to the Passive House Institute’s project documentation, it was the first residential building in Australia to be built that way.
Then in March 2022 the region flooded. The house came through it.
We mention that project more than any other because it is where the two halves of this business meet. We could not have built it without Pro Clima systems, and we would not understand those systems the way we do if we had not spent months detailing one.
Why We Moved to Distribution
Building one high performance house at a time is slow. There is a limit to how many you can do, and a limit to how much difference you make doing them.
Distribution reaches further. The builders we now supply through hardware stores and trade merchants are working on hundreds of projects a year between them, and most of those projects need a membrane and a tape whether the builder has thought hard about condensation or not. Getting the right product onto those sites, with someone available to explain how to install it properly, does more good than another certified house would.
So we stopped building and started supplying. Scholten Group is now the Pro Clima partner and wholesale distributor for New South Wales and South East Queensland.
What We Do Now
We hold stock in two warehouses. Pearces Creek in the Northern Rivers is where we started and where the business is based. Our Brisbane warehouse opened to serve South East Queensland, which was being supplied out of northern New South Wales or from interstate and deserved better than that.
We supply retailers. Hardware stores, trade merchants, building supply businesses. We do not sell to builders directly and we do not run an online shop, because a supplier who competes with its own stockists is not much of a supplier. Builders who contact us get sent to their nearest store.
And we train. Product training for retail staff so they can answer a question across the counter, and hands-on installation days for builders and trades, usually run with Pro Clima’s technical people. Most of our training is free.
Our Credentials
Both directors hold Passive House trade certification. Scholten Group is listed on Pro Clima Australia’s partner register. We are members of the Australian Passivhaus Association and the International Passive House Association.
Work With Us
If you run a hardware store or trade merchant business and your customers are asking for building membranes, we would like to hear from you.
If you are a builder looking for product, we will point you to whoever is closest.