Aizlinn Tyrie
View from the Top
by Eric Johnson
[COVER STORY]
The view is incredible. A verdant landscape peppered with the tops of tidy houses, stores and office buildings stretches out as far as the eye can see.
While the airliner ascends into a bright blue sky after a smooth takeoff from Dulles International Airport, the view from the passenger window slowly expands to include the towering buildings of Rosslyn and, in the distance, the Washington Monument.
Passenger Aizlinn Tyrie takes it all in, then glances downward and smiles with satisfaction. Right there, directly under the wings of the climbing airliner and nestled in a cozy neighborhood by a green field, is the roof of her lovely Chantilly home.
Aizlinn calls the Chantilly community “beautiful.” It’s a beauty that satisfies whether Aizlinn is on the ground or, as
she sometimes finds herself when traveling for work or pleasure, high in the air. No matter where the eyes land, the Chantilly perspective is always a view from the top.
“The townhouse we are in has a huge, open field outside the backyard,” Aizlinn said in a recent interview. “This is a calm, family neighborhood. Nice, quiet and calm. It feels isolated and comfortable. Walks are so pleasant. It’s beautiful.”
Aizlinn and her boyfriend DeAndre Pitts recently celebrated their first anniversary as Chantilly homeowners. Each grew up as an only child in a family that started elsewhere but eventually settled in Northern Virginia. Today, Aizlinn’s parents live in Ashburn and DeAndre’s mother resides in Fairfax.
Aizlinn enjoys working from home as an IT risk consultant for a major accounting firm. It’s a position that perfectly matches the college training she received at Virginia Tech, where she studied accounting and information systems before graduating in 2019.
Energetic and outgoing, Aizlinn recently joined two friends in launching an events planning service. The three have been best friends for more than a decade. They share interests in decorating and planning, and they are now pursuing the startup business on the sidelines of respective full time jobs.
“We should have our website soon,” she said. “We’d love to have an office someday.”
Aizlinn has been nurturing Royce since he was a puppy.
Aizlinn and boyfriend DeAndre chose Chantilly for their home.
Aizlinn cut her entrepreneurial teeth years ago by running a small baking business while still in high school. Her former position as president of the Virginia Tech chapter of the National Association of Black Accountants taught her how to network for events. Moreover, she learned and had a lot of fun “cooking for everyone” as a member of Tech’s Caribbean Student Organization – a membership at the crossroads of her penchant for cooking and heritage as the daughter of a Jamaican father and a mother from Trinidad and Tobago.
Needless to say, Aizlinn loves to cook. She finds inspiration in the rice and peas, jerk chicken and fresh spices of her father’s culture and the India-rooted cuisine of her mother. She truly appreciates variety.
“I tend not to repeat dishes too often,” she said, a few hours before turning attention to preparing that night’s dinner of Korean sticky ribs with salt, pepper and white rice.
Benefiting from Aizlinn’s kitchen skills is DeAndre, who she met when he was a trainer at her former gym in Ashburn. With a background in physiology, he currently works as a trainer at a gym
in Fairfax and as a deejay for parties, weddings and school events in the area. Aizlinn serves informally as his personal manager; she took the lead in designing his business cards and sprucing up his social media page.
Aizlinn also contributes to their relationship through the third member of the household – a black Labrador Retriever affectionately named Royce. She’s had Royce since puppyhood in December 2020 “when he liked to sleep all the time. Now, he’s full of energy.
“He’s a big boy,” she said with a grin. “He just got told by the vet that he’s a little overweight. He needs a diet.”
The field behind Aizlinn’s home serves
as a perfect playground for Royce. She also occasionally escorts him to a local dog park for a good time with a friend’s dog and the friend, who lives in DC and appreciates Chantilly’s open spaces.
These days, now that the pandemic
is history, getting out of the house is a must for Aizlinn. As her working hours are usually spent at home in remote-office mode, she tries to get to the gym a few times weekly and hopes to join an intramural sports team in the fall.
Yet being at home in Chantilly is always a pleasure. Aizlinn can gaze at the greenery outside her windows, for example, and watch neighborhood children playing after school.
“The kids here are elementary to middle school aged,” she said. “It’s almost like clockwork to see them come home
and then enjoy themselves outside, sometimes riding their scooters.”
Ample room to breathe was a major factor that attracted Aizlinn and DeAndre to Chantilly when they started shopping for a home in 2022. They checked out a house in Leesburg, for example, before settling on their Chantilly townhouse. Another factor affecting their decision was Chantilly’s central location near parents, workplaces and convenient shopping.
“There is a little bit of everything around me,” Aizlinn said.
Chantilly’s proximity to Dulles was another big plus. Aizlinn lives right around the corner from flights that can take her to cities for work-related training sessions or client visits. She and DeAndre have traveled together to many places including Jamaica, San Francisco, Boston, Charlotte and Raleigh. They planned an off-the-beaten-path tour of San Diego and will go on a dream vacation in January on a cruise ship with stops in the Dominican Republic, Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos Islands.
Indeed, Aizlinn can look forward to a future with many more opportunities
to see Chantilly’s beauty from the perspective of an airliner’s passenger window. It’s a satisfying view that tops them all.
Flying high in the sky and then casting one’s eyes on a beloved home in Chantilly “is definitely a positive experience,” she said. “I can look down and say ‘Yeah, I live there.’”