By ROB BRINKLEY + Photographs by NAN COULTER

“Three years of my life, gone.” That pronouncement is followed by a deep laugh, which is followed by a flash of the iciest blue eyes, ever. Charlotte Jones has been a little busy. Cranes have barely stopped swinging outside her office window in Frisco, all around The Star, the newly opened, 91-acre headquarters compound of the world-famous Dallas Cowboys football team. The place gives new meaning to the word multifunctional: It boasts a 12,000-seat indoor football stadium, two outdoor football fields, a cafeteria, corporate offices for the Cowboys and rentable meeting spaces. There’s more: a luxury gym, a private social club, restaurants, shops, an Omni hotel and a Baylor Scott & White sports-rehab facility. And you thought your to-do list was long.

Jones — her dad is Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner, president and general manager — has been on the project every shovelful of dirt along the way. She has worked for the Cowboys since 1989, the year after she graduated from Stanford University, and today oversees everything from brand marketing and stadium design to community relations and the inimitable Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The Star has Jones' imprint all over it, from the sports facilities to the furnishings to the contemporary art collection, an extension of the one she and her mother, Gene Jones, oversee for AT&T Stadium. “There is nothing,” Jones says, “that I didn't sign off on. This was my baby.” Especially her office. Behind a pair of massive, Macassar-ebony pocket doors is Anderson's inner sanctum, a virtually all-white space cut with more gleaming Macassar ebony at each end, as walls and shelves, and pops of bright blue, a nod to the Cowboys’ signature hue. Jones' office walks the line between modernist and maximalist, with plush white carpeting and guest chairs upholstered in what looks like metallic white snakeskin. She was inspired, she says, by the office of mercurial magazine editor Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, a surprisingly soft and pretty space for such a hard-nosed character in an intense industry. That isn’t lost on Jones: “I had to make something feminine out here,” she says — followed by that deep laugh again.