Similar to the way that the cell factories allow you to customize the cell (the transformation of a logical cell to a list of nodes to render) for these controls, it should also be possible to customize the pane used internally to layout the cells to begin with. You should be able to do this without subclassing. You can add a property called panelProperty that can be bound. The value must allow children to be added. You can specify that the returned hierachy of nodes indicate which "node" should have the "children" added to it by adding a property called "items" or some such marker approach. With this you can get rid of the orientation property on ListView, etc.