Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m2 (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m2 (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare: