If your keeping the stone pick horizontal or shingles, not both. 3 different types of siding on that small of an elevation will look off. Myself I would keep the stone and use the shingles.

Which door is the front door? I think it would be nice if one door stood out as the front and the walkway went directly to that door.

We actually have both -- Hardie 'cedar' plank siding in Coastal Santa Cruz-area house; and stucco on the house we just moved into on the Peninsula. The stucco seems to have held up reasonably well -- there are some cracks, but nothing too bad, and I'm sure it's not been repaired for years. It definitely gets dirty from the trees, vines that were growing on it, etc. That was unexpectedly annoying. We put the Hardie siding on about 4 years ago, and we've been really happy with it. That climate is pretty rough on houses -- close enough to the ocean for the air to be salty, lots of fog, very sunny -- and the siding is holding up really well. It *does* seem to retain a lot of heat, however! During the afternoon, it's definitely very warm to the touch; and it warms up the interior of the house. We also painted it a light grey-blue, though -- that might pull in more heat than say a white would. Overall -- if we ever do this again, I'd go with Hardie. Good luck. These fires are terrible; we get the smoke, which is bad enough; and we watched the helicopters fly over our house on the way to fight the CZU fire in 2020. So much worse to lose your house. <3

Generally, the choice to do just primed Hardie Board is because the color you want for the exterior is not available as one of their colored options. So if you like one of the color options available, go with that. The other option is to simply do the math: is it more or less expensive to have your painter do everything vs. buying Hardie Board with a color?