Smart buildings today are aimed at providing safe, healthy, comfortable, affordable, and beautiful spaces in a carbon and energy-efficient way. They are emerging as complex cyber–physical systems with humans in the loop. Cost, the need to cope with increasing functional complexity, flexibility, fragmentation of the supply chain, and time-to-market pressure are rendering the traditional heuristic and ad hoc design paradigms inefficient and insufficient for the future. In this paper, we present a platform-based methodology for smart building design. Platform-based design (PBD) promotes the reuse of hardware and software on shared infrastructures, enables rapid prototyping of applications, and involves extensive exploration of the design space to optimize design performance. In this paper, we identify, abstract, and formalize components of smart buildings, and present a design flow that maps high-level specifications of desired building applications to their physical implementations under the PBD framework. A case study on the design of on-demand heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems is presented to demonstrate the use of PBD.