The Friends of Oxford Botanic Garden commissioned FRLA to assist them in exploring the feasibility of creating a new visitor centre at the Harcourt Arboretum site. We worked with representatives from the Friends organisation and the Garden’s staff to explore their requirements for the new facilities. Using this list and our database of visitor centre sizes we developed schedules of accommodation and adjacency diagrams for three scales of centre to match different budget and visitor number scenarios. This provided the team with an idea of the sizes of building that would be required to meet their needs. One of the key questions that the team wanted answered was how much it would cost. Despite the early stage of the project, and again using our database of visitor centre projects, we were able to address this by benchmarking the three different scales of building against other completed projects and discussing with them the potential implications of certain design and project management decisions.