When Japanese architect Kengo Kuma was growing up, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen were some of the first stories to spark his imagination. “I was so familiar with his tales — I felt close to them,” he says. Many decades later, his studio returned to these fables to design H.C. Andersen’s House, a fantastical new museum in the small Danish city of Odense. “I tried to express [Andersen’s] magic in the architecture,” says Yuki Ikeguchi, the partner in charge of the project, who led the design from the firm’s Paris office. “I wanted to take visitors to a different world.”

Thumbelina-inspired metal flowers decorate the museum’s underground world, while skylights look up to the gardens above.

In this case, most of that world lies deep below the ground, where the 5,600-square-metre museum eventually expands to reveal its full splendour. While largely a result of the desire for an extensive garden, this subterranean design approach is also a reference to Andersen’s story The Tinderbox, where an entire world sits hidden below a tree.

Before visitors make their descent, they arrive off the street via a timber-framed gateway. This modest entrance is designed to blend in with the area’s gabled row houses, one of which served as the museum’s former location and the author’s childhood home. From there, three circular glass and timber pavilions are strung together like a chain. Resembling the suction cups along an octopus’s tentacle, these house the museum’s reception area, café and children’s centre.

The museum’s swirling arrangement of three interconnected circular pavilions is part of a larger circle motif that continues throughout the underground exhibition spaces.

With the museum’s strong circular motif — continued in the winding ramps that lead down to the lower level — the firm creates a feeling of being swept off to somewhere spectacular. Sure enough, the sunken concrete exhibition spaces make for an especially magical backdrop to the gallery’s mix of immersive sound, light and art installations, which were developed by Event Communications with various artists.

A crystalline dome sculpture evokes a pivotal setting from The Snow Queen — which went on to inspire Frozen.

As visitors move past sculptural interpretations of key plot points from Andersen’s fables, skylights offer occasional glimpses of the world above. These fresh points of view are another riff on Andersen’s stories, which often encourage readers to question which character a narrative really belongs to. “We wanted to give people room to develop their imagination,” says Ikeguchi. “That is one of the reasons that visitors can feel a story in the museum.”

Exhibition spaces are designed to spark the imagination. Here, fabric seats recall The Little Mermaid’s stone seabed.

Back above ground, a garden landscaped by MASU Planning introduces an elaborate maze of snaking hedges. Notably, this green space isn’t just for museum visitors — it’s a free park for everyone in the city to enjoy. Much like Andersen’s profound allegories, the extraordinary museum remains thoughtfully grounded in daily life.