I'm currently working on trying to find locations for some of the known rooms and things inside Alfea, (at the moment specifically, I'm working on the kitchen and dining hall) before I put myself through floor plans again. So I thought I'd share what some of my working out looks like behind the scenes.
And why it might be a problem that Season 8 turned these flat topped towers:
Into these much shorter flat topped towers:
Because I'm currently fairly certain that was the dining hall in that upper half.
Trying to figure out where the dining hall is, isn't a one room tracking operation, because we know there's a kitchen, we've seen it, we've seen the Winx Club set fire to it with their negligence. You don't typically put a food making place far from the eating place, so tracking one, should help track the other.
We first see the kitchen in episode 105, when the girls are on dinner duty (or making a spell with potato peels and a magical back-flip if you're a 4kids truther), and during dinner prep they head back to their dorm to help Stella pick an outfit.
From their dorm, they're able to smell the smoke and react, racing to the kitchen before even the chef and Griselda arrive, though not by much in Griselda's case. (Also, Bloom uses the same spell Griselda does a few episodes later back on Earth in her house while cooking with Vanessa. Just saying.)
This means, or at least suggests that the kitchens are not only in the same building as their dorm, but reasonably close by.
When we return to the kitchen in episode 115 we actually have a little zoom around the rear tower and focus in on a spot above/behind the rear most dorm balcony on the building before phasing inside to the girls walking along a hall to the kitchen.
While the hallway is different between the two episodes, background continuity is not Winx Club's feature, but it does double down on the idea that the kitchen is in that building.
(In 105 the girls turn a corner into a short hallway, while in 115 it appears to be a long straight hallway with windows all along it. Though later in the episode the looking out view does look kindamuch the same as 105?)
(props to Alfea for having non-magical fire extinguishers for added safety)
Or at least one of the kitchens is in that building, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there are two. Or at least a smaller communal kitchen for the other mirrored building, so the girls don't have to go across campus for a midnight snack.
Further, although the exterior and interiors of the school don't always match up exactly, in several shots of the dining hall, we can see the six bays of tall windows. Now there is a chance they could just be windows from the middle floor, one of the balconied window sets, but the shape and compactness matches much more closely with the tower's rear facing window wall, the one that leads out onto the flat balcony.
The number of windows/bay divisions don't match up perfectly, but again, internal-external logic consistency isn't 100% at Alfea,
Additionally, in these shots from season two, we can see some smaller windows lining the upper sections of the wall opposite the window wall, which match up loosely with the windows on the rear towers, where they meet the roof of the dorm section.
We should also talk about sizes and room dimensions.
Based on the door below the smaller windows, the windows are at least three maybe four meters off the floor. The tables run about 5 meters.
Estimating for girls behind pillars, the most packed side holds 16 students, while the least packed has space for 13.
A quick bit of research into bench tables brought me some numbers.
The longest commercial tables I could find that came with suggested sizing by seat number suggested that for a 10 person table (4 on each long and 1 per end cap, so realistically for out count and 8 person table) would range between 2.2m, 2.6m, or 2.8m depending on how comfy or squished the seating is expected to be. Doubling those numbers to get tables to seat 16 max per side, we end up with tables ranging 4.4m, 5.2m, and 5.6m.
Doing a quick eyeball and stamp measurement, and given that the room isn't perfectly circular, but there is at least one (suspiciously straight) hallway outside it, I'd be okay saying that we're looking at a space with a rough diameter between 9 and 15 meters.
Finally, there's the thing that might be a door opposite the teachers' dais, which I think might match up with the external door on the tower that leads up a protruding staircase to a spiral staircase that leads to the observation platform on the top of the tower.
Or at least an elevator or internal spiral staircase up to the external door, or even a door across a corridor to the external door, depending on how big the overall dining hall really is in relation to the tower it's sitting in.
Why don't I think it leads to the kitchens?
Well, let's look at the kitchen: it looks roughly square, or at least not a whole lot longer one way than the other, so we're looking at a squarer sort of rectangle at most, and with that we can do a few quick calculations based on what's in the kitchen.
First, my research tells me that in a commercial kitchen, like for a restaurant, recommended kitchen size is .5m² per seat. The count of the students at the table (estimated 16+14+14+13=57 plus three teachers) give us around 60 seats, which makes our estimated kitchen around 30m².
(That's a fridge in the left corner as far as I can tell, though I did for a short time assume it was stairs. Gosh darn pattern on the door, fooling me.)
Further, commercial fridges, double ovens and cupboards give me widths of 610cm for a fridge, 60.96-68.58-76.2cm for double ovens, and 1200cm for a cupboard. recommended ventilation distance between ovens is a suggested minimum of 15.24cm, and there are four ovens along one wall with the fridge and the free standing cupboard. Using the largest width for ovens, we're looking at a room of at least 5.62m across.
It's important I note here, that the room isn't actually square, while the main body of it looks that way, there's also a little alcove attached along that wall.
Now there is a bit more space between the ovens than is recommended, enough for Musa to hide between them comfortably, but this gives us a starting base.
Even if the dining hall is 15ms across on the outside, that's still enough room to fit the kitchen in the tower given some of my other calculations which have the width of the mirrored buildings at 24-30m across, which should translate to the width of the flat topped towers.
But again, there's that zoom in, and the fact the girls come in from the side and turn left into the kitchen. I think we're looking at a kitchen position that's a little something like this:
Although I am hoping that despite the lack of any doors in the alcove, there's actually a walk in fridge/freezer behind the back wall, because there's plenty of cooking spaces, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of food storage outside the free standing fridge in the corner, the pantry by the alcove, and the alcove.
Maybe there's more in the various short cupboards, but at least a portion of those would be for cooking utensils, crockery, cutlery, and I don't see any that are different enough to indicate cold storage vs long-life/shelf.