Former Playboy ‘Bunny’ shared horrific reality of living in mansion with Hugh Hefner

A former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner exposed the reality of what it was like to live in the infamous Playboy Mansion in her brutally honest memoir.

Back in the early to mid 2000s the Playboy Mansion and its inhabitants became underwent a radical rebrand.

Thanks to the creation of reality series Girls Next Door and a revolving door of famous faces visiting the property, Playboy no longer appeared purely as a men's magazine.

However, Playboy's reputation for sex, excess and live-in girlfriends with identically bleached hair was never far from the surface.

Several of Hefner's former girlfriends have spoken out about life in the Playboy mansion, including Izabella St. James (pictured on the right) (Denise Truscello/WireImage)

Numerous ex-Bunnies have since come out to reveal what it was really like to live in the infamous mansion as one of Hefner's girlfriends, with women recounting tales of tightly controlled appearance requirements, meals which indicated that Hefner was in the mood to get frisky and copious amounts of viagra.

The overall grubbiness of the mansion is another common reoccurrence, with several women claiming the LA mansion was a dirty place.

And not in the way you're thinking.

One account of the mansion's grim interior comes from Izabella St. James, who lifted the lid in her 2006 memoir, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion.

St. James had been a girlfriend of Hefner's between 2002 and 2004, even moving into the mansion for a period of time.

However, it was not what you'd expect from the home of a millionaire.

"He liked the girlfriends’ rooms to look very girly, all white carpet and pink walls," she explained in the book.

"We all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, but the mattresses on our beds were ­disgusting - old, worn and stained."

Izabella St. James reportedly dated Hefner from 2002 to 2004 (Amy Graves/Getty Images)

St. James added that Hefner would eventually allow new carpets to be fitted in the bedrooms and the walls to be re-painted, however, she believed the grubby state of the mansion was something he was used to.

"Hef was used to dirty carpets," she added. "The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.

"Late at night, if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom, we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess."

That is certainly an image you wouldn't associate with the apparent glamour of the Playboy Mansion.

St. James isn't the only former girlfriend to share a more critical view of her experience in recent years either, with the likes of Holly Madison and Crystal Hefner also speaking about the realities of being a Playboy Bunny.