Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion is known to be the ultimate party house, the most sought-after venue for all sorts of debauched parties and events. But Carla Howe, a 25-year-old British Playboy Bunny, says this is all in the past. She claims that the house has lost its glitter and needs a complete renovation.
"[Hugh Hefner] refuses to change anything in the mansion and the whole place feels like it's stuck in the 1980s," Howe told The Sun.
Where once, bikini-clad girls paraded around the house, now Howe claims that there are more nurses than models. According to her, Hefner, 89, is too old and too frail to even consider getting the place back to its original glory.
"Most of the time all he wants is to play chess with his friends and watch old films," she said.
She isn't the only Bunny to complain about the mansion's crumbling state. Izabella St. James, a law graduate who met Hefner in a Hollywood nightclub in 2002, wrote a tell-all autobiography entitled "Bunny Tales." She went into details of what's behind the mansion's glamorous facade.
"Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture. It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room," according to an excerpt acquired by the Daily Mail. "The mattresses on our beds were disgusting - old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too," she added.
She also said that Hefner isn't one to mind dirty things. His bedroom carpet, for one, has not been changed for years. The former Bunny said that because there were multiple dogs inside the house, the carpets reeked of urine and mess.
"Everything in the Mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay," St. James wrote.
During his prime, Hefner, described as an "eccentric millionaire," has kept the mansion to be one of the most coveted residences in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Forbes describes the estate as a "sprawling Gothic/Tudor mansion." Its 14,217 square feet living area has seven huge bedrooms and eight baths. Other amenities include a media room, game room, and wine cellar. Outside, the grounds has three zoo and aviary buildings, a pet cemetery, tennis court, pool and waterfalls, basketball, koi pond, citrus orchard, and other quirky features. As listed by Zillow, the property is estimated to be worth $33 million.
