Changing the New products layout on front page

This design was offered to the client by a colleague who got a little carried away with the design without paying too much attention to the realities! Unfortunately he is in hospital, recovering from a massive operation, and is in no condition to discuss it with either the client or myself, but deadlines are looming and before I go down the course of "I know you were promised this BUT..." can anyone suggest a way to come up with something close to this?

This is intended to be the central display of New Products on a 1.3.0.1 cart:

1. I know the LISTING for New Products can have the various elements positioned in Admin, but which file would I be looking at to change the layout of the product elements here?

2. I think that with the use of IF statements in common/tpl_columnar_display.php that I could probably utilise CSS to produce the borders as the left and right "columns" are going to be different. Does that sound feasible?

you need to change a file \includes\modules\new_products.php