Alla Nazimova was the original resident of the house which she nicknamed the Garden of Alla as a pun on a popular 1910s novel (and later Dietrich movie) “The Garden of Allah.” Here she is seen pruning the driveway long before she turned the place into the quickly legendary hotel:

Alla was a woman of many extraordinary talents, but I suspect laying tile was not one of them. It looks like she was just “helping”: