The ground-state characterization of the polaron problem is retrieved within the framework of a variational scheme proposed previously by Devreese et al for the bound polaron. The formulation is based on the standard canonical transformation of the strong coupling ansatz and consists of a variationally determined perturbative extension serving for the theory to interpolate in the overall range of the coupling constant. Specializing our considerations to the bulk and strict two-dimensional polaron models we see that the theory yields significantly improved energy upper bounds in the strong coupling regime and, moreover, extrapolates itself successfully towards the well-established weak coupling limits for all polaron quantities of general interest.