York and the landmark exhibition on Philippine pre-Hispanic gold, Philippines, archipel des échanges (2013) at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Throughout his career, Villegas served as an appraiser and art advisor and cultivated a following amongst prominent Filipino collectors including Maria Theresa Virata, Richard and Sandra Lopez, interior designer Johnny Ramirez, Claude Mark Wilson amongst others. In 2005, Villegas and gallerist Evita Sarenas of Finale Art File started Finale Auctions, one of the first modern auction houses centered on Philippine contemporary art that held a total of 13 auctions. From 2013 until his death in 2017, Villegas later served as a historical consultant for Leon Gallery Fine Art and Antiques, one of the leading auction houses in the Philippines and wrote essays on Philippine art, colonial art and colonial furniture for their auction catalogues. Amongst the important collectors that Villegas represented through his career, his close association with Philippine art collector Paulino Que has been considered as one of his most enduring contributions in Philippine art. Through his expertises and advice on Philippine art, the Que collection is considered as one of the important private art collections in Southeast Asia. Villegas subsequently wrote two cover issues for the international art and antiquities magazine Arts of Asia that featured the Que collections of Philippine colonial furniture in 1991 and their collection of Philippine modern and contemporary art in 2004 respectively. In 2013, Villegas collated over 51 important works of National Artist Hernando R. Ocampo from the Que collection and mounted a special retrospective on the artist called The Real H.R. Ocampo: From the Paulino Que Collection at the Ayala Museum that was subsequently published in an exhibition catalog authored by him. In 2021, the exhibition was virtually remounted by the Ayala Museum in honor of Ocampo's 110th birth anniversary. Antiquities dealer, jeweler, and gallerist Since his childhood, Villegas took a keen interest in jewelry making with his experiences his family's own jewelry shop, Capricci. He later took ownership of the said jewelry shop, and was later renamed as Capricci Jewellers and Goldsmiths that specialized in contemporary jewelry designs and was situated at the Manila Garden Hotel (present-day Dusit Thani Manila). Villegas' own appreciation of Philippine art and antiquities, in turn, led to his career as an antiquities dealer. He later established Yamang Katutubo Artifacts and Crafts a shop centered on Philippine antiques, which subsequently transferred to the La'O