Off and on, I keep attempting to write fanfiction and one thing I keep having trouble wrapping my head around is how the dorms are supposed to be laid out. I think all we've really seen of them have been 2 (and a half) bedrooms, one hallway connecting the RWBY and JNPR bedrooms, and the roof.
Like, is there a communal living space? Are the bathrooms/showers attached to the bedroom, or are there communal showers?
And then, what level of comfort do you think Beacon provides? By all accounts, it looks like Beacon provides its students with full living arrangements so maybe there's some sort of kitchen for those that want to cook their own meals instead of what's provided in the cafeteria? But a lot of people make comparisons with Grimm hunter academies (especially Atlas's military academy) and boot camps, so maybe the accommodations are more spartan?
I usually prefer falling back on the idea that each bedroom has an attached bathroom and shower, and that the dorms are just the little bedroom apartments, mostly because I do not otherwise know what one does in a dorm.
I've never lived in a dorm myself but I have a friend that currently does, and from what I've seen it was clusters of rooms sharing a hallway and bathroom. Like, a door to a small hallway with 4 to 6 rooms and a shared bathroom, and then several of those clusters in a larger building. I also imagine there's a shared kitchen. I can ask though. The thing with bathrooms though is specifically the scene where Jaune and Ren are talking. Ren basically having nothing on but a towel either implies there's a bathroom/shower attached to the rooms and he was just getting out, or he walked from a shared shower down the hallway basically nude. In both cases though, there's the question of why he didn't get dressed right out the shower. If Jaune demanded to talk to him immediately, I guess, but if not and he just happened to get caught right after the shower, then in both cases the only thing I can assume is that he expected no one to be in the dorm and wanted to get dressed in the room, which is kind of odd to do imo. In honesty it probably doesn't matter though since it was just a gag scene.
For common areas, I imagine the rooms themselves are about as common area as it gets for each team, and outside of that it's whatever space there is on the school grounds. I also imagine the students are at least fairly accommodated; Atlas and Shade are likely pretty spartan, considering the lore behind them (I picture Atlas similar to a military academy and Shade similar to... idk, like the hidden leaf village or something), but I imagine at least Beacon students are given more freedoms and accommodations; kitchen, bed, bathrooms, AC, time off, etc. From the food fight, we can see the students are provided plenty of food of all varieties and time to eat, so I imagine Beacon is somewhat well off.
All that sounds pretty likely (right down the hidden leaf village, lol). We do get a rough idea of what Atlas's dorm rooms look like but obviously there's gonna be cultural differences and besides which, I -- like most fans -- tend to focus on writing for/from the Beacon era (I do like me a Peggy Sue fic using the fall into Ambrosius's void tho).