In the grand opera tradition, the drama is typically spread over four or five acts. Between them, the scenery changes and the stage is reinvented while patrons stretch their legs, have a drink and soak up the ambiance. When intermission rings, there are few more scintillating venues than the Copenhagen Opera House, home to the Royal Danish Opera, which meets the bustling city’s harbour with a delicate glass lantern of a lobby perched below a sleek knife-edge canopy. Immediately to the south, meanwhile, an inviting new public park extends the stage with a civic narrative that plays out across six striking gardens.

Designed by local architectural firm Cobe, the 21,500-square-metre Opera Park unfolds in a sequence of sinuous walking paths, framed by an eclectic (and impressively biodiverse) array of plantings and ample seating. The varied landscape replaces an underused green lawn on a small island that was once part of the Royal Danish Navy dockyards, and offers an interwoven sequence of five distinct milieux, all radiating out from the site’s central pavilion. Recreating the North American forest, the Danish oak forest, the Nordic birch forest, the cherry grove garden and the English garden, these spaces are carefully organized as a richly layered mise en scène — hinting at the drama next door.

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1North American forest

2Oak forest

3Birch forest

4English garden

5Cherry grove

6Subtropical winter garden (inside green-house pavilion)

“Like an opera stage, the park is a composed landscape with a foreground, a middle ground and a background,” says Cobe founder Dan Stubbergaard. “The terrain and trees are tallest where they form the background and lowest in the foreground towards the harbour. This creates a depth and allows you to view all the different trees and plants in the garden from the opposite side of the harbour.” Taken together, the park comprises 628 trees, 40,000 bulbs and 80,000 herbaceous bushes and perennials, including 223 species of plants in all.

A greenhouse inside the central pavilion continues the park’s winding paths with a subtropical garden that unfolds across multiple floors.

As for the sixth garden? Located at the heart of the park, an elegant greenhouse pavilion integrates a welcoming subtropical forest. Behind its sleek, nearly invisible glass walls, the flower-shaped structure — which is topped by a green roof and expansive skylights — offers an all-season retreat (hence its designation as the “winter garden”), completed by a tranquil café with both indoor and outdoor seating.

Excess rainwater is channelled from the roof of the neighbouring Copenhagen Opera House and used to irrigate both the greenhouse and the outdoor plantings.

“The transparent design creates a seamless blend of nature and commerce,” says Stubbergaard. “As a seasonal project, the park adapts to varying weather conditions, and the café in the greenhouse serves as both a haven during cold months and a natural pause for visitors in the summer.” Past the commercial space, the interior leads down to a two-level underground parking garage that quietly accommodates 300 cars, maintaining the tranquility of the haven above.

And as curtain call beckons, theatregoers are conveyed from the park to the Opera House (on the neighbouring island of Holmen) via a covered pedestrian bridge, opening up another panorama of the harbour and the historic city centre across the water. But the result is much more than a stopover on the way to the theatre. After all, its immersive gardens create stages of their own. Whether you arrive in black tie attire or a T-shirt and jeans, a taste of the civic spotlight awaits.