Pilar Viladas, a veteran writer and editor whose human touch and encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, design and art history gave her work a quiet authority, died on March 15 at a hospital near her home in Southbury, Conn. She was 70.
The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, her sister Luisa Viladas said.
Starting at Interiors magazine, a trade publication, in 1979, Ms. Viladas’s decades-long career traced the whipsaw design trends of the past half-century, including the arch whimsy of the Memphis movement in early 1980s Italy, the gilded excesses of late-1980s interiors, the minimalism of the ’90s and the swaggering era of star architects at the turn of the last millennium.
Ms. Viladas was an editor at Progressive Architecture, HG and The New York Times Magazine, and a contributor to Town & Country and Architectural Digest, among many other magazines that documented, with anthropological zest, the totems of privilege and lives well lived. But Ms. Viladas wasn’t interested in fads or fetishes, although she noted them with amusement. Her taste was for enduring expressions of good design.
Holly Brubach, a former style director of The Times Magazine, hired her in 1997, after Ms. Viladas had completed a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies at Harvard.
“It was the era of the starchitect, and all those sleek, slick, glitzy buildings,” Ms. Brubach said in an interview. But Ms. Viladas, she said, “was more interested in the way people lived and the role design played in their lives — and I don’t mean the aerodynamic shape of a chair.”
“It was how people arranged their homes and made a place for the things they loved,” Ms. Brubach added. “She brought a human perspective to it that I really admired.”
At The Times Magazine, Ms. Viladas covered a who’s who of design stars. She wrote about the modernist architect Deborah Berke and the eclectic domestic interiors of Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown. She visited the apartment, at the San Remo, on Central Park West, of the fashion designer Donna Karan and her husband, the sculptor Stephen Weiss. And she chronicled the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando for fashion designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani.
Her favorite house, Ms. Viladas often said, was the Houston showplace of John and Dominique de Menil, the Schlumberger oil family scions and art collectors — a low-slung glass and brick house designed by Philip Johnson, with interiors by the fashion designer Charles James. When she visited in 1999, a few years after Ms. de Menil’s death, she marveled at the home’s “material splendor — suave modern architecture, jaw-dropping art and serious furniture — and its casual down-to-earth aura.”
Ms. Viladas also wrote about her favorite apartment: “the impossibly chic London flat” belonging to Ingrid Bergman’s character in “Indiscreet,” the 1958 romantic comedy that co-starred Cary Grant as a man pretending to be married to escape commitment. Ms. Viladas loved the riot of color and texture in the apartment’s elegantly proportioned living room (not to mention the film’s tart dialogue).
“Because she was so educated, she could recognize intention in design and, for her, that was always good,” said the writer William Norwich, a former colleague at The Times Magazine. “She was a discerner, and she was a gatekeeper, but she was not a snob.”
The photographer William Abranowicz, who shot the de Menil house for Ms. Viladas’s 1999 piece (and for many more of her articles) said of her:
“She trusted you to walk into a space, to feel what she could articulate and to make an image. The other thing I loved about Pilar was sometimes when you did a story with a designer, they would try and steer the story. That’s when her teeth came out — and she had some good teeth.”
Maria Pilar Viladas was born on May 6, 1954, in Greenwich, Conn., the eldest of four children of Angeline (Schimizzi) Viladas and Joseph M. Viladas, a marketing research consultant. She attended Greenwich High School and studied art history at Harvard University, graduating in 1977.
In addition to her sister Luisa, Ms. Viladas is survived by another sister, Mina Viladas. Their brother, Jordi, died in 2022.
Ms. Viladas was the author of and a contributor to many design and architecture books, including “Los Angeles: A Certain Style” (1995) and “Domesticities: At Home with The New York Times Magazine” (2005).
“I have an idealistic view of design,” she told Whisper Editions, the former art and design auction site, where she was a consultant, in 2014. “Design is a much bigger idea than how a lamp works. It’s a way of looking at the world.”
