Starting with the extended homogeneous balance method and a variable separation approach, a general variable separation solution of the Broer-Kaup system is derived. In addition to the usual localized coherent soliton excitations like dromions, lumps, rings, breathers, instantons, oscillating soliton excitations, peakon and fractal localized solutions,some new types of localized excitations, such as compacton and folded excitations, are obtained by introducing appropriate lower-dimensional piecewise smooth functions and multiple-valued functions, and some interesting novel features of these structures are revealed.