Imagine the nightmare that you get when you build a home. If you ever build a home, renovate a flat, or sit through an interior consultation in Delhi NCR, you already know the grill. Your architect hands you the list. You spend the next three weekends driving from Kirti Nagar to Sector 49 to a basement shop in Lajpat Nagar, figuring out samples, comparing finishes, second-guessing your choices, and quietly losing faith in the entire process. By the time cement is poured, you have made fifty material decisions you barely understood.
The Knowledge Center, Guruguram, is built to end exactly that experience.
What is the Knowledge Center?
Knowledge Center or KC is a one-of-a-kind physical and digital ecosystem dedicated entirely to the construction and design industry. Their first office sits in M3M Broadway on Gold Course Extension Road, Sector 71, Gurugram, and spans 1,00,000 square feet across two floors. It is the only place in a country where the architects, designers, a contractor, a builder, and the actual homeowner can walk in together and see, touch, compare, and finalise material across nearly every category of construction– under one roof.
It is not a multi-brand store. It is not a co-working space. It is not a trade fair. It is closer in spirit to a permanent, curated exhibition for the way India builds- backed by a membership model for professionals, a collaboration model for brands, and a deliberate refusal to take commissions on product sales.
Features and USP
Things that set KC apart from anything in the design and construction landscape:
Everything under one roof: materials across 6200 categories- Cement, TMT bars, pipes, aluminium, fabric, furniture, paint, hardware, wood, lighting, sanitaryware, finishes. Civil to surface, structural to decorative. If it goes into a building, it lives at KC.
A level playing field for brands: Artisans and small manufacturers from Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan share the same shelf treatment as national giants. KC does not run on commissions, which means a small ceramics cooperative gets the same visibility as a multi-crore plywood brand.
Built for the end consumer too, not just the professional: Most B2B platforms treat homeowners as the silent third wheel. KC actively brings them into the room, with one-to-one scale plan facilities, where you can stand inside the actual dimensions of your bedroom before a single brick is laid.
AI-powered material discovery: walk into a hotel lobby, photograph a wall finish you love, bring it to KC, and the system will tell you which category, which dock, which rack to look in.
A pan-India roadmap: Gurugram is the first store out of 149 planned across the country.
Excerpts from the Interview
Square Foot Story (SFS) sat down with Sachin Bansal, Co-Founder, Knowledge Center, to understand how a 1,00,000 square feet hub becomes a fix for one of the most fragmented industries in India.
SFS: Where did the idea of the knowledge center begin?
Sachin Bansal: The idea started during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with my partner Ankur Jain. He was the conceptualization member. Initially, we were more focused on the digital side, but later the idea for a physical presence evolved, and we started with a leased space in Gurugram, Sector 71. This is our first store, followed by another 149 stores. So, a total of 150 stores are planned pan-India. We are trying to construct an ecosystem for the construction industry — and we are present both physically and digitally.
SFS: What was the gap in the market that you saw?
Sachin Bansal: The gap was very prominent in our minds. My partner, Ankur, an architect, has completed about 900 projects so far. In every single project, one thing was common: the end customers, the homeowners, were always struggling with their designers and architects to bring that one specific thing they really wanted in their home. The problem was right in front of us. In every project, we were dragging our end customers along with us, store to store, shop to shop. That was when we started thinking that there should be a place where all the construction materials come to the customer, rather than the customer going to each construction material shop.
“We did not want to become just another multi-brand store. We built a platform — an ecosystem — for the entire construction industry that connects everyone, without disrupting their existing sales.”
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Sachin Bansal
Co-Founder, Knowledge Center
SFS: How are architects and designers engaging with the space so far?
Sachin Bansal: Right now, 750 architects and designers are associated with us, and more than 500 brands. We already have 120 brand samples on the floor, and as we add more, the response we are getting is exactly what we hoped for. People walk in and feel that this is the gap that has been taking care of their problem in such a nice way. The overall experience, the material they can see, the way it is organized — it has been an amazing experience for architects and designers. We are opening up more centers from July 2026.
SFS: What kind of material does KC actually stock?
Sachin Bansal: Everything from the civil side, everything from the material side. Anything and everything from the construction side — we have divided it into 6,200 categories. Cement, iron rods, TMT, pipes, aluminium-related material, fabric, furniture, paint, hardware, wood, all of it will be available here.
SFS: Talk to us about your expansion plan.
Sachin Bansal: There are approximately 13 cities where businessmen and partners have shown interest. Our next stores will most likely be in Noida, Bangalore, Raipur, Ahmedabad, Panipat, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kochi, Hyderabad, and Chennai. As more people come in and more ideas develop, we are evolving as well. This is the first store, and we genuinely want to see how well we can create the process and technology that takes care of people in the way they expect.
A good house, a good business, a good shopping mall, good interiors, these are not requirements of metro cities only. They are requirements for everyone. Everybody deserves the experience of not just owning a house, but also building it well, running a business well, and going through the construction process well. That is the biggest problem in the market today, and we are trying to solve it.
SFS: The technology layer that holds it all together?
Sachin Bansal: The technical side includes information technology, software, our website, and the use of AI. We are in the age of artificial intelligence, so the question is, how do we leverage it to solve day-to-day problems, especially in the selection and comparison of products? For example, if you stayed at a hotel and took a picture of the lobby or the room, you bring that picture to us, and we will tell you where the material is available, which category, which docket, which rack. You will find it. And we will help you build something similar for your own space as well.
Why this matters for the way India builds and buys
At SFS, we spend a lot of time talking about transparency in Real Estate, about builder credibility, RERA disclosures, hidden costs, and the asymmetry of information that has historically defined Indian homebuying. The same asymmetry runs through the design and construction layer that comes after possession.
When an architect specs a tile, when an interior designer recommends a paint brand, when a contractor sources hardware, most homeowners have no idea whether they are getting the best material at a fair price, or whether the decision is being shaped by relationships they can’t see. KC’s no commission model and its insistence on equal visibility for small and large brands is, in its quiet way, an attempt to fix that.
The other thing worth noting, and this came clearly through conversation with Sachin, is that KC is not positioning itself as a metro-only luxury. The expansion includes Raipur, Jaipur, and Panipat alongside Bangalore and Hyderabad. The bet is that a homeowner in a Tier-two city deserves the same access to materials, comparisons, and informed choice as someone building in Golf Course Extension.
Whether KC delivers on all 150 stores remains to be seen. But the first store in Gurugram is already doing something the industry has not done before, bringing the homeowner, the architect, the brand, and the technology under one roof and refusing to take a cut for it. That in a market built on capacity, is a story worth following.
Visit KC: https://kc-one.co/
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From SFS Desk:
https://squarefootstory.com/up-rera-caps-property-transfer-fee-for-family-and-third-parties/
https://squarefootstory.com/lt-reality-acquires-land-expands-portfolio/
https://squarefootstory.com/square-foot-story-sfs-indias-real-estate-intelligence-platform/
