Helping you notice the beauty in your ordinary life
I’ve lived in London for more than 35 years and have over 260,000 photos and videos on my phone. I know. Crazy. Somewhere along the way, taking all those pictures taught me to slow down and notice the little things around me.
Most of what I share happens to be in London because this is where I live and where I walk most days. But Rita Farhi Finds isn’t really only about London. There is travel, midlife, the places I love and all those ordinary moments I might once have walked straight past.
I share what I notice because I hope it makes you notice a little more too. The changing colour of a tree, a beautiful street you normally rush through, the light at a certain time of day, a coffee somewhere lovely. I suppose that’s really why I’m here. To help you slow down and notice the little things in your own ordinary life too.
The story behind Rita Farhi Finds
It started with my daughters.
When they became curious about social media, I wanted to understand the world they were about to enter, not from the outside, but properly, the way you’d want to understand any place your children were about to spend time in. So I opened an Instagram account of my own.
I didn’t set out to make it about me. I picked up my phone on the school run and started photographing London instead: a doorway, a certain light on a wet pavement, a tree that had gone from bare to full in what felt like a single week. I’d walked past all of it for years without stopping.
It happened to be a hard year underneath the ordinary one. I’d lost my father not long before, and some part of me needed somewhere to put my attention that wasn’t grief, without pretending the grief wasn’t there.
Noticing London, it turned out, was that place.
A doorway doesn’t ask anything of you. It’s just beautiful, and then you’ve stopped, if only for a second.
The account kept growing. What began as research into a platform I didn’t understand became something I hadn’t expected: a way of seeing, then a way of writing, and eventually a small, real body of work of its own.
What Rita Farhi Finds is now
These days, it’s two things held together: London and travel, the seasonal guides, the hidden corners and the places I send people when they ask where to go, alongside the more personal writing: midlife, family, beauty and what it means to keep noticing when life doesn’t always make that easy.
Along the way, Rita Farhi Finds has led to collaborations and commissions with The Ritz London, Condé Nast Traveller, Travel + Leisure and the Michelin Guide, creating everything from social storytelling and destination content to editorial features.
If you want the fuller version of how this started, the year that changed everything and what I was actually carrying on those first walks, I wrote it properly, once, here: