It is obvious that designing new materials heavily reposes on the chemical composition as the main driving force behind their beneficial behaviour. Yet, in many cases, the praised chemical composition serves only as a backbone for the desired performance while the the advances in the morphology actually enable the enhanced performance. In plethora of examples the phenomenology behind layered or in other way ordered constituting domains of certain material proved particularly beneficial. This phenomenology can be further extrapolated for the case of functional nanomaterials. Charge transfer layers (CTL) in solar cells present a good example: one would like to allow more interface but not at the cost of transfer efficiency, e.g., layer constituted from vertical arrays of semiconductive ceramics allows high specific surface area, high efficiency of the transfer and to an extent, selectivity for the species being transferred. Many of the available top-bottom approaches, often multistep, particularly reposing on physical deposition methods, “force” the preparing of such material. One can find only few bottom-up approaches where chemical bath synthesis is used to foster spontaneous self-assembly into such materials. Both strategies are focused in this work. To wrap up, few concepts where synergy of the both approaches could be utilised in the future are discussed.

Acknowledgment: 
This work has been funded by the projects UIP-2019-04-2367 and PZS-2019-02-1555 by the Croatian Science Foundation, and KK.01.2.1.02.0316 by the European Regional Development Fund.