In software product line engineering, the construction of an architecture for a product family is still an outstanding engineering challenge.In current practice, a framework is used for configuring individual products by combining solution space artefacts into products with specified features according to a feature model. No architectures are created. In contrast, an architecture for a product family would define the architectures for all the products in the family, allowing engineers to reason at a higher level of abstraction. In this thesis, we present a component model that can be used to define architectures for product families, by incorporating explicit variation points.