The project was a major gamble for Paxton, but circumstances were in his favour: he enjoyed a stellar reputation as a garden designer and builder, he was confident that his design was perfectly suited to the brief, and the commission was now under enormous pressure to choose a design and get it built, the Exhibition opening now being less than a year away. In the event, Paxton's design fulfilled and surpassed all the requirements, and it proved to be vastly faster and cheaper to build than any other form of building of a comparable size. Indeed, his submission was budgeted at a remarkably low £85,800; by comparison, this was about times more than the Great Stove at Chatsworth but it was only 28 percent of the estimated cost of Turner's design, and it promised a building which, with a footprint of over , would cover roughly 25 times the ground area of its progenitor.