I was going to suggest going off grid electric, but given the power demands for the hobbies, that is a lot of panels. Still, I'd do the calculations. Is that a good wind area? If you can do it, you might flip David's suggestion of one utility around. Going back at least a decade, there are plenty of people out there that got disgusted with the cost of brining in electricity and went off grid instead. If you have nat gat, genset manufacturers have finally come around to making DC gensets for that application. (You really need a generator to equalize batteries by my understanding. That may well be, however, for flooded cell batteries only.) How come 3 ph is not a better way than single? You'd get 50% more power adding a third conductor of the same size. If you can get the POCO to give you 3 ph open delta, you can have 3 ph and 240V. That said,as Mike pointed out, with the cost of VFDs so low, what's the point? I was shocked when I looked at costs online a few months back. Note that you have to be careful about how the utility bills other than residential 124/240 too. The local utilities commission regulates that and some make sure that commercial and industrial users pay more by charging lots more/kWh for anything 3 phase. If you build efficiently, your costs other than the shop, hobby and domestic hot water can be be nil. Tankless and recirc seems like a weird match to me. You have a system that provides hot water on demand so you have no standby losses, then you connect it to a system with standby losses. Is the recirc going to be on a timer or controlled with occupancy sensors? If I have gas and need a new water heater, I'd buy a Westinghouse WGR060NG076 or larger tank and never look back. That goes especially with hard water unless you plan to install a water softener. Have you done the well research yet or maybe drilled already? I'd go with induction for your cooking hobs if you want easy clean-up. There is nothing easier. If you are not sure about it, buy a plug-in unit and see if you like it. You may save a lot of AC costs in addition to the straight savings at the cooktop. Ideally, I'd like one resistance hob for simmering. They suffer from the same drawbacks of the duty-cycle controlled power output as thermostatic resistance heating devices. I don't know if inverter powered induction is theoretically possible or practical as it is for microwave ovens, but it might work well if it is.

I am with you....in our first house we had a wood burning stove very much like the one in your picture. It heated our whole house. We had access to free firewood so we had free heat all winter long. Was also very nice when we were without electric from a winter storm. I also cooked on it some. Now we have a gas fireplace in this house and it is nice, I guess. We do miss the wood stove but not the dirt :)

Just to echo - zoning will not help much in energy costs. I am very strict on energy use - like top 1%. My newer 3800 sqft house on 2 stories is not zoned (but we do have 1 unit per floor). There are no areas in Florida that see extreme temperatures that I know of. The outside temp is always pretty close to the desired indoor temp. So shutting off one area is of little value even if the house is poorly insulated. If you lived in Minn and it got to -10 or you lived in Arizona and it got to 120, it would still not be worth it but at least it would be closer. The issue in Florida is solar gain and humidity control. Focus on those things with humidity control being about air sealing and proper bathroom venting (I am really like humidistat controlled fans - especially for children). It is always fairly helpful to consider what $7k would get you in solar panels. Perhaps 50 times the savings of zoning? Do basic things like make sure ductwork is in conditioned space (I think FL code strongly encourages this). But mostly, overhang your southern windows and avoid western windows (and east too). Also balancing the number of east and west windows will help with sizing and long run times. If you just have western, you will get long run times in the second 1/2 of the day but short in the first. Make sure you have long a/c run times to maximize humidity removal - and generally zoning will shorten runtimes which leads to suboptimal humidity control. Also - I can't imagine zoning a single unit to cover your house. Not in Florida with a modern house. Now you can do a mini or two for special circumstances. But that is another can or worms. I have to laugh at the "four filters" to change. Oh the horror. I think I have 8 filters in my house. One in each bedroom. After a year, they still look new. Heck, I have 2000 sqft houses that have 3. It isn't that big of a deal. I would rather have more and change them less often. Rule of thumb for filter removal is pretty dumb - like 30 days or 90 days.

Thanks for the feedback on this everyone. Just wanted to update in case anyone else has such a dilemma. I DID find the material I was looking for (grey with white veining) after searching inventory systems all over the country for weeks. The material is a marble, and called Blue de Savoie. I ordered a sample of from a slab and fell in love. Sadly, the slabs were only available in NYC and I was outside of their delivery range. I tried everything to get the slab or something similar sourced through local vendors and could not make it work. I ended up going with a Carrara marble instead which wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but did turn out very nicely. I think the fireplace complements the kitchen and other finishes we chose well. Please see attached for initial Savoie de blue marble I found, how our fireplace turned out and a photo of our kitchen which is located at the other end of the room that the fireplace is in. The house is still under construction hence some incomplete finishes. Thanks everyone for the feedback.