There are a bunch of these on our island. The fireplaces are in the middle of the house, small doors, and once they get that brick warm the houses are 80 all winter long. They were built by Russian families in the 1940s, maybe a couple dozen homes on about 300 acres. The rest of the home's construction was typical; except for a few innovative walkways between main house and garage. I'm guessing it's what they knew from their homeland, even though temperatures here rarely drop below 20, and then, only for a short time.

That sounds really interesting. Which island is that?

There's a whole site dedicated to the (highly efficient) Russian/German stove: https://larsenfamily.com/russian_stove/nojava/index.html

I grew up like this. We had special glass plates on the doors so you could see the fire (though this meant cleaning the glass every week).