Inside the £13,500-a-month X-Factor House

The X-Factor finalists could be forgiven for being a bit underwhelmed by their surroundings on moving into their new pad this week. Because while Zoopla has revealed that the Hadley Wood mansion costs an impressive £13,500 a month to rent, it has also highlighted that it's not a patch on the property last year's X-Factor finalists were put up in.

The six-bedroom and four-bathroom property is said to be worth £3,623,000. It doesn't sound like too much of a hardship to be moving in, but in this expensive bit of Hertfordshire, that kind of money doesn't buy jaw-dropping glamour. When you compare it to the property they used last year - worth £9 million - it doesn't compete.

This time around there's no state-of-the-art car lift, no indoor pool or cinema room. The lack of a pool may come as something of a shock to the contestants - as for the past few years there has at least been an outdoor pool and a sauna.

It means the contestants may not be overly impressed - especially after spending time at the 'judge's houses' around the world, where no expense was spared.

Instead of blowing them away with a mega-mansion, the X-Factor is putting them up in a perfectly lovely family home, in a highly desirable part of the country, with all the white walls and beige sofas we have come to expect of a luxury home.

There is also plenty of open-plan reception space and a large patio, for the contestants to spend time in reasonably close proximity with one another, where the cameras can pick up on all the tensions that are bound to come up.

And in case any of them try to retreat the privacy of their bedroom, there's the fact that in the early days the acts will be forced to share rooms - and there's not enormous amount of privacy a person can enjoy in a bunk bed. There may well be more of what one of last year's finalists called "Big Brother meets Glee meets prison."

It seems, therefore that the contestant's loss may be the programme's gain.