Looking for a theme with specific capabilities

Hi, I’m looking for a 3-column wordpress theme that has or can be adapted to create the kind of website I have in mind. I have looked around already, but since this is to be my first blog (yes, I know what you’re thinking) I lack the practical experience to recognise a candidate or know how feasible this is.

What I’m looking for is a theme that can be scaled up to something like this.
I’m planning a similar kind of highly categorised image heavy site and DRB is one of my main inspirations.
Ideally all I’ll need to do is worry about content curation, and upkeep like archiving posts by month into separate pages with thumbnail previews + and the same for specific post categories will be automated and ripple across the existing pages. Widget/plugin space and ad management is also a must.

I’m looking to prevent problems down the road, hence the search for scalability and everything else I’ve mentioned. How possible is all this?

Thanks for any help!