The palazzo is a three-floor building with an elegant and imposing architectural structure and its façade was once plastered in solid stucco. On the ground floor it has a robust architraved porch supported by pillars. In the central part it opens and there is a two-floor high gabled loggia with Ionic columns and a bas-relief Greek key frieze running between the second and the third order of windows. A motif of dentils completes the line of the roof and of the gable. The stucco decorations, which make the façade even more sumptuous, are all by Giulio Luccardi, brother of the more famous Vincenzo Luccardi, a sculptor from Gemona.
Works started in 1833. Signers of the project were Pietro Antivari, and “Pietro Salvador Cappo Muraro”. The latter had to direct the work of masons and stonecutters, while the coordination of works was entrusted to Giovanni Battista Bassi (1792-1879), a professor of Mathematics and Architectural design at Royal Lower Schools in Udine. As against the original project by Jappelli, some changes were made in course of execution: the renunciation of the statues which should have been on the roof and on the sides of the gable (4 altogether), the non-realization of more statues and of a frieze with dancing puttos on the gable, and the presence, not foreseen, of a frieze with festoons and fruit running near the roof. The interior should have been as sophisticated, too; there are still some of the elegant original decorations. In its first version, before the changes of last century, the main entrance gave on a shining hall whose six doors led to a spacious staircase or gave access to studies, warehouses and shops for the trade of leather, hemp ropes, cloth and fabrics. The shops had windows under the porch: they were the first of this kind to be opened in Udine and they were an example for many other shops.
Going up to the piano nobile it is possible to find the typical arrangement of aristocratic Venetian houses, with a central hall which is the reference point of all the other rooms. The hall is decorated with motifs - racemes, lozenges, rosettes – with chiaroscuros in artificial stucco, paintings and trophies and various decorations, and it reveals the craft skills of artists such as the already mentioned Giulio Luccardi and the flower painter Giovanni Pontoni from Udine. Three doors give onto the portico of the façade whose barrel vault is covered by monochrome racemes. The words of Antonio Picco, the artist who decorated the house of the Antivaris with wall decorations made of fantastic and bizarre motifs better known as “grotesques”, underline the importance of the presence of the sculpture from Gemona during the works at the palazzo. “[…] all the decorations in stucco, both in the outer part of this palazzo and in the interiors, are made by Giulio Luccardi who directed and carried out all the decorative work in the hall, in the loggia and in many secondary rooms”. But the interiors of this palazzo are sophisticated and elegant on the whole: there are rooms where Oriental-style decorations with thin golden columns and light acute arches take the lead, and there are chandeliers hanging magnificently from coffered ceilings completely embellished by paintings and stuccos representing flowers and fantastic animals.
Colourful grotesques with zoomorphic figures in golden stucco and garlands, which are repeated also on the panels of doors and furniture, are the decoration of the living room where there is still the original furniture in Empire style which has been designed together with the palazzo. Then there is a bedroom, communicating with the living room, which has a ceiling with monochrome grotesques and is divided at two thirds of its length by four little coupled columns and two little semicolumns with Corinthian capitals which support three acute arches (and all of them are made of wood). This special layout, designed by G.B. Bassi, separates the bed area, which has a ceiling with three imitation domes, flowers, birds and a small carriage of Venus, from the rest of the room.
In a third bedroom, on the opposite side of the hall, under a ceiling with domes and white stucco frames there is a nice and very colourful decorative frieze with large garlands of flowers and animals surrounding circles with romantic landscapes. On the walls there are two paintings on canvas: an idyllic scene of the time by the Florentine Andreotti and a painting by S. Bruzzi. Among the other decorators who worked at the palazzo and who enable us to enjoy their splendid works, it is necessary to remember Tommaso Turk, Giuseppe Del Negro from Udine, who worked on the ceiling of the hall, Ferdinando Simoni and Luigi Stella.