FineLife gets finer

FineLife has undergone a metamorphosis. Last week, it was a twice-folded newsprint tabloid. Now it’s a glossy, forward-looking magazine.
Delivered locally in the Sonoma Valley Sun, the new and improved bimonthly publication is also distributed to portions of Marin and San Francisco through a partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We at Three House are very excited to be taking FineLife to the next level. It was important to us, that we develop a strong product that reached beyond our Valley’s borders, to provide our local advertisers with not only a large distribution base in the Sonoma Valley – through 15,700 Sonoma Valley Suns – but to an equally large distribution base in Marin and San Francisco,” explained Three House MultiMedia president and FineLife publisher Stephanie Dunn. “Our partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle, allowing us to reach their highly valued subscriber base, enables us to offer our advertisers very competitive glossy pricing to over 30,000 North Bay households. Our product is unique, the editorial content is fresh and compelling. We like to think of FineLife as developing into Vanity Fair West” added Dunn with a smile.
FineLife editor Daedalus Howell echoes Dunn’s sentiments and relished having the space for the writers to explore their subjects with a breadth and depth unavailable in the previous format.
The content of FineLife has expanded greatly, and now brims with profiles and features as well as irreverence. The taste-making guide “Fine, Finis, Finally” and “The Morning After,” a new spin on the social column. Plus there are new departments, as with the “advice-column-meets-video-store” feature. Investigative pieces, humor and fiction also bolster the new FineLife as well as holdovers from the publication’s previous incarnation like 10Q, the question and answer interview conducted by the editor. Design director Barney LaHaye packaged the new content in a svelte and eye-catching design.
“We’ve assembled an eclectic team of award-winning writers and photographers that really delivered in this issue. It bodes well for subsequent editions, which I anticipate will make similar, exponential leaps,” said Howell. “Our editorial meetings consistently arrived at the same sort of ethos ‘The future is unwritten, so let’s write it together.’”
Inasmuch as the FineLife team put an emphasis on being forward-thinking, they also remained attuned to the magazine’s origins. The unofficial mantra heard throughout the office in the weeks preceding publication was “wine country is a state of mind,” which begs the question, how does one capture a state of mind in words and photographs?
“We never lost sight of the fact that we’re a Sonoma Valley publication reaching out and re-introducing ourselves first locally and then beyond. One of our goals was for FineLife to be an ambassador of the Valley and to capture our uniqueness without diluting it with a lot of ‘grapes to drapes’ style coverage. Photo editor Ryan Lely’s cover with supermodel Irina Pantaeva and sommelier Christopher Sawyer is a great example of this renewed spirit,” explained Howell. “It’s been a hectic and exciting process – and we can’t wait for the next issue. Maybe we’ll call it FinerLife,” Howell quipped.