This Old House Will Soon Come To Your Mailbox

Lucky is the magazine that starts out with a demonstrated potential audience of 10 million people. That’s how many watch “This Old House,” public television’s fix-it-up show, which this week will spawn This Old House magazine.

To make the connection to public TV’s highest-rated series as clear as a newly installed thermopane window, the May-June issue features host Steve Thomas and master carpenter Norm Abrams on the cover. Several pieces, as well as a pull-out set of architect’s drawings, are tied to a Napa Valley, Calif., farmhouse undergoing renovation on recent broadcasts.

Like the 16-year-old “House,” the magazine presents a lot of shiny hardware and other guy-oriented matters, such as the salvaging of century-old logs from muddy river bottoms. At the same time, the new mag has the airy design and high-tone beauty of Martha Stewart Living, the popular women’s mag, as evidenced by the new publication’s evocative pictorial of porches.

The resemblance is no accident. Both are properties of Time Publishing Ventures Inc., a magazine-development division of Time Inc., and This Old House aims to reach many of the same women drawn to Stewart’s boundless array of homemaking and gardening ideas.

“It blew us away that nearly half the viewers of ‘This Old House’ are female,” said Eric G. Thorkilsen, 44, who is president and publisher of the new magazine and was the founding publisher of Martha Stewart Living. “The feeling of Norm and the other people connected with the show is that it’s a couples’ show. If you’re going to tear apart your house during a renovation, you’re going to do it together.

“And so, too, the magazine will lean a little heavier toward men, but also toward women.”

The editor is Isolde Motley. Among her first contributors are John S. Saladyga, a home-repair writer for Newsday, who reports on treated woods and exterior paint jobs, and gardening writer Ken Druse, on planting long-lived trees for the various regions of the country.

As part of the development plan, the 500,000 copies that went on sale Monday are labeled “test issue.” This choice of words allows Thorkilsen and company to assess the initial newsstand response, subscription orders (from insert cards) and returns on a direct mailing (also planned for this week) before proceeding with a full-blown launch. As the publisher put it, “We reserve the right to publish one more time or a hundred more times.”