Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) include engineered interacting networks of physical and computational components. As they are widely used in many application domains, guaranteeing their correct and proper behaviour is an essential and a challenging issue. This paper aims to contribute to a flexible design and development of structured CPSs, composed of similar elements, and capable of (self-)adaptation to satisfy evolving internal and external constraints, e.g., using control theory. To this end, we make use of their structure and of their behavioural characteristics for modelling by hierarchical motifs both systems’ elements and controllers. The motivations and contributions are illustrated on a smart building example.