Long before Kuma, there was a small yellow house at 45 Hans Jensens Stræde, on the corner of Bangs Boder in the old town. It opened to the public as a museum in 1908 and has been the anchor of Andersen tourism in Odense ever since. There is a catch that Odense has always been honest about: nobody can prove Andersen was born in it. The identification is traditional, never conclusively confirmed, and the plaque by the front door has been enough to give the building its second name — H.C. Andersen's House. Inside, a room is arranged roughly as it would have looked in 1805. When the new museum was built, the 2005 extension around the house was demolished and the old house left standing, a small yellow object at the centre of the garden.

The house Andersen actually remembered is a few minutes' walk away, at 3–5 Munkemøllestræde, close under the cathedral. He lived in that half-timbered cottage from the age of two until he was fourteen, in one room. It opened as a museum in 1930 and its exhibits are deliberately domestic: the cobbling tools his father used, and objects reconstructed from Andersen's own descriptions of the place. Standing in it, the arithmetic of his life becomes very simple. There was almost nothing here — and everything he later wrote about being small, poor, overlooked and unexpectedly transformed came out of these dimensions.

Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805, the son of a struggling shoemaker and of Anne Marie Andersdatter, an illiterate washerwoman. He was sent to a school for poor children, supported himself as an apprentice first to a weaver and then to a tailor, and at fourteen went to Copenhagen to try to become an actor. He was not a good actor. He became instead the author whose tales have since been translated into more than 125 languages, and he died on 4 August 1875 at the age of seventy. The museum's job is a strange one: to explain a career that, from the evidence of Munkemøllestræde, should never have happened.

In 2016 the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, working with the museum design consultancy Event Communications, won an international competition for what Odense called the House of Fairytales. Kuma's scheme turned on those cylindrical volumes — glass, timber lattice, scooped green roofs — arranged so that the boundary between building and garden keeps dissolving. The landscape was designed by the Copenhagen practice MASU Planning, and most of it is open to the public whether or not you buy a ticket. The result inverts the usual museum logic. Instead of a monument containing an exhibition, there is a garden with an exhibition buried beneath it.

Event Communications described the intention as an "immersive theatre" that "taps into a fundamental aspect of fairytales – they are journeys where the line between the everyday and the transformative is blurred." In practice the visitor is moved through spaces rather than past cases. It is a risky approach for a literary museum, where the actual artefacts — manuscripts, paper cuttings, a battered suitcase — are small and quiet. The buildings are run by Museum Odense, a self-governing institution since 2018, which also looks after the childhood home, the Renaissance city museum at Møntergården, and the open-air Funen Village. Between them they cover the whole arc: the room he grew up in, the town he escaped, and the vast underground room the town eventually built to explain him.