We design a nearest-neighbor architectural layout that uses fixed positive and negative couplings between qubits, to overcome the effects of relative phases due to qubit precessions, both during idle times and gate operations. The scheme uses decoherence-free subspaces, and we show how to realize gate operations on these encoded qubits. The main advantage of our scheme is that most gate operations are realized by only varying a single control parameter, which greatly reduces the circuit complexity. Moreover, the scheme is robust against phase errors occurring as a result of finite rise and fall times due to non-ideal pulses.