The building's story is really an argument caught in stone and ceramic. At meetings on folk crafts in 1902 and early 1903, the artist Serhii Vasylkivsky attacked the original design by the architect Shirshov. When the plans were reworked but still felt like standard government fare, the reformers pushed for something rooted in local folk forms, and the writer among them proposed a name for what they were after: the Ukrainian style. Opanas Slastion took the case to the newspapers of Poltava and then Kyiv. Two competitions followed in June 1903, and a commission led by Fedir Lyzohub weighed eight proposals before settling on Krychevsky's. Because the foundations had already been poured that spring, Krychevsky had to redesign a building that was, in a sense, already being built beneath him. Folk ceramics from the nearby village of Opishnia gave him his palette.

What Krychevsky produced is unapologetically expressive. Two tall, slender towers with folded tent roofs flank a central mass that pushes forward in three parts. A high base of roughly hewn pink granite anchors the walls, which are faced in light yellow ceramics and banded with orange, ornamented with motifs Krychevsky drew from folk art, trees of life, stylized flowerpots spreading their branches across the plaster. Above the main portal, coats of arms of the governorate's towns sit among painted flags and blue-and-white twisted columns. Crowning it all is a roof of greenish-blue glazed tiles, laid in a mosaic so that its color shifts with the weather and the angle of the sun. It is a building designed to look different depending on when you stand before it.

Inside, the drama continues. A wide marble staircase splits in two directions beneath a glass ceiling that floods the central hall with light, ringed by blue-and-white columns wound with ornament. The main meeting hall was the showpiece: floral decoration from sketches by Mykola Samokysh, and three large narrative paintings by Vasylkivsky, aided by Mykola Uvarov and Mykhaylo Berkos. Each told a story the region wanted to tell about itself. One depicted the election of a Poltava colonel, celebrating democratic choice; another, a Cossack facing a Tatar, honored the defense of the land; the third, the Romodan trade road, portrayed commerce and enterprise. Together they turned a council chamber into a statement of local identity and pride.

The building served as administration and museum until 1920, when it became a Soviet proletariat museum. In 1943, as the Nazis retreated from Poltava, they burned it. Reconstruction in the 1950s brought it back largely to its original form, though the roof and the murals of the main hall were altered. Today it houses the Poltava Museum of Local Lore, and since 2021 it has again been under restoration, the latest chapter in a long effort to preserve a landmark that did more than shelter a regional government. It launched a national style, and it has needed rescuing more than once to keep that beginning visible.