At the risk of boring everyone who's been here for any amount of time... I am a supplemental heater. I run two large stoves 24/7, which will never have any hope of heating my entire house. So, after the first few years of making my family miserable while keeping the thermostats low and trying to heat this joint entirely with wood, I changed my perspective. These days, I have my programmable thermostats to just make the house whatever temperature we want, and I keep feeding wood into these two stoves at a rate that fits my schedule. My house is warm, my family is happy, and I'm still saving a metric buttload of oil each year. I highly recommend this approach, to anyone with a high heat load.
Now, if you're going to follow this path, what you want is a stove with a big fuel tank, that can meter it out slowly. There are several stoves that can run 30 - 40 hours on a single load, and this is the direction I went. In the dead of winter, I load one of them 2x per day, and the other 1x per day. Each one has a mechanical thermostat, and I found the settings on the dial of each that give me consistent 12 and 24 hour burn times on my primary wood species (oak). When the weather is less cold, I dial them back even farther, to 24 and 36 hours per load, respectively.
What you need to remember, if you're new to wood burning, is that all stoves of a given cubic footage hold the same amount of BTU's. Essentially, the BTU count is fixed by wood volume and species. All you can control is the time period over which it is released, or BTU per hour. Some stoves have a much wider range of control than others.
8 inch flues are the territory of some monster stoves, typically well over 3 cu. ft. Just be sure they're not going to roast you out of the house. Again, think BTU/hr, when comparing stoves. Efficiency plays in, as well, but the differences in efficiency between most modern stoves is usually small, compared to other factors.
Free standing stoves can radiate off six sides, inserts radiate only off one side. Free stoves also benefit from better natural convection. If trying to use this as a heater, and free-stander will always be the better performer, but sometimes they just don't fit the space.
So... a new house.
Hand-hewn, unless so long they're beyond the capacity of any of the local mills at the time, is usually the realm of 18th century homes. It would be surprising to see hand hewn beams in something as new as 1890, especially in a place settled as early as Staten Island.
Either way, the reason I ask is because masonry houses (not masonry covered stick houses, but true, proper masonry houses) do very poorly with a radiant stove. Essentially, all energy radiated from the stove will be soaked up by those walls, and transmitted to the outside. You need a highly-convective stove, if you have an uninsulated masonry home. Period, trust me.