Eric Henry, a carpenter and builder in Southwest Harbor, is driving the salt-worn roads on the backside of Mount Desert Island. As his truck rambles along, Henry points to houses as if they were celebrities at a party. He knows them all. He understands them. He wants them to shine, grumbles when they don’t.

This is quite apart from the fact Henry is one of the most successful and sought-after builders on MDI, one of Maine’s oldest summer colonies and a high-dollar vacation spot. Henry and his six-person crew take on a variety of year-round building projects around the island, and he always has an eye on preserving the integrity of old structures.

Henry’s redesigns for houses in Bernard and Bass Harbor will be featured on the Oct. 31 segment of Home and Garden Television’s “Restore America,” a half-hour cable TV show about homes, buildings, neighborhoods and gardens throughout the United States. Hosted by Bob Vila, the do-it-yourself house guru, “Restore America” is a 52-week series featuring restoration projects in 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The show airing later this month is devoted entirely to Maine and was shot in locations around the state over the summer. Vila did not attend the on-spot shootings but will be added to the final edits as host.

In addition to Henry’s building projects and the restoration of a Tremont home belonging to Bill and Tina Baker of Bangor, the show will include the couple of comeback causes, Bob and Suzanne Kelly of House Revivers, and their redevelopment work on downtown’s Bangor Furniture building. The show also will include refurbishment projects at mills in Lewiston-Auburn and the McLaughlin Garden, a 60-year-old perennial garden in South Paris.

The documentary crew interviewed Gov. Angus King, Bangor Mayor Joseph Baldacci and his sister Rosemary, who is a partner in a new eatery in the renovated Bangor Furniture site on Hammond Street, as well as members of the Maine Association of Conservation Commissions in Bath.

“This is not a tourism council event,” said Kathy Filosi Nelson, the independent producer and writer for the Maine segment. “We dig in and get a little more of the human side. I look for those angles that make the story unique.”

Take Mary Jones’ house, for instance. When Jones bought an ailing 1936 shingled structure near Pointy Head in Bass Harbor, the only charm was in the view over the water and a granite foundation. Jones, who is vice president of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, wanted to refurbish the place to reflect her own personality as well as the marine history of the area.

“I’m not a purist,” said Jones, who formerly owned Green Acres Kennel in Bangor. “I don’t want things to be frozen in time. Buildings should have adaptive reuse with respect to that which preceded it.”

In a walk-through of Seascape, the name Jones has given her house, she points out features to illustrate her philosophy. The front door made of cypress was taken from the loft of a nearby barn and cut down to fit into the entryway of the house. Jones speculates that the wood dates, literally, to the days of Christopher Columbus and may have been ballast on a sailing vessel. The sidelights framing the door come from a demolished house in nearby Seal Cove.

In the kitchen, Jones gestures toward the pantry, which is covered by a aged barn door complete with the initials “C.D.” carved on the inside. The central room, which has 13 natural light sources (including windows and glass doors), is constructed of exposed rustic beams and boards that Henry, the builder for the project, carted from a steamboat wharf in Belfast.

“They are a part of coastal history,” said Jones, whose transformation of the house paralleled transformations in her personal life. “I believe in the marriage of the old and new. I felt drawn to this place. I had to be here. I was still me but it was a new me. The old mixed with the new.”

After all, that’s the essence of the “Restore America” show and the basis for what Henry calls “honoring the style and making it look modern.” He took the same approach to an 1840 Cape Cod structure he purchased 10 years ago as a personal project. The house was built near a swamp and quickly took on the name “Swamp House.” At first, the term was descriptive and pejorative. But these days, when Henry shows the house, he does it with pride.

“It’s a handsome house,” he said. “For most of these houses, I don’t believe in putting them back the way they were. I’m not into making Williamsburg or Sturbridge Village. That’s a museum piece and I want houses people can live in. You look at this house and then you look at a modern ranch. Which one do you want to live in?”

The answer: The Swamp House.

When other projects weren’t calling, Henry and his crew gutted the place in Bernard and laid pine floors from a demolition site in Waterboro. The wainscoting is made from horizontal wide-board heart pine out of an old cottage on Somes Sound. The slate for the hearth was left over from another job.

The decor — which could only be described as yard-sale or cutout-bin chic — follows a similar principle of “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” Furniture pieces designed and built by Henry’s father-in-law, who now owns the house with his wife and lives most of the year in Iowa, include cabinets made from the former kitchen doors of the house, an entertainment center made from discarded tile clock faces, and a side table from old wood found in the basement. The basement, which is only 4 feet wide, has the most inventive item in the house: a three-wheeled scooter chair that allows a person of any size to zip around from water heater to storage area without hitting his or her head.

All of these touches are not likely to be featured in the HGTV program but are very much in the spirit of the show. And Maine, where the history of house building goes back to long before the Revolutionary War, has many examples of homeowners who find value in the old while implementing the new. Jones, in fact, is participating in a survey, funded by federal money, of Southwest Harbor buildings older than 50 years. She also is leading an initiative to establish historic districting in the town.

Her partner in historical efforts is Ralph Stanley, president of the MDI Historical Society and a Southwest Harbor boat builder who recently was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship for Folk and Traditional Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts. He and Jones offered several history lectures to locals recently. While Jones gave actual history, Stanley, whose family has lived in Southwest Harbor for seven generations, told colorful stories from his memory of the homes and the people who owned them.

“A lot of people who come here don’t know history or this town and have the perception that nothing was here before they came,” said Stanley, who was born in 1929. “They just like what they see. But then they displace what they like. You’ve got to have change. You can’t stop that. But today it happens overnight. It’s so quick, it takes you off your feet. These old houses represent the people who found the town, the citizens, the people who shaped the way things happen. For the most part, they were pretty honest people who wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. When you tear down those houses, you lose that.”

Stanley, Jones, Henry and others featured in the HGTV show are part of an effort to restore American identity through honoring tradition — and participating in modern life.

“I felt Maine was committed to rebuilding its own structures,” said Kathy Nelson. “Urban renewal has been the death knell in this country. But restoration efforts like these are giving us back our identity. People there have a Down East sort of spirit, and it’s an indomitable spirit. There are only two choices: Either we can do it, or we can do it.”