Forms, Fields, Validation, and control of displaying errors

Hello,

After a long time away on other projects where Vaadin wasn't appropriate, I hope to be back using Vaadin in a new project.

As part of it, I'm building a public facing Wizard; using the splendid Wizard plugin, along with Viritin & Valo, I've come up with the attached - looks quite lovely, i think.

But, what I really want to do is to change the presentation so that
a) Required fields *do* show an error indicator when empty 
b) Validation errors are displayed in a separate html element (or label) beneath the field itself
c) Validation errors are *not* displayed as a tooltip.

I think that most of this is currently handled by the FormLayout + the VFormLayout widget.

I want to keep the standard configuration + immediate (eager) validation of fields - but I want to handle the display of the errors myself. 

What is the best way to deal with this? 

Cheers,

Charles.