In many physical systems, when implementing quantum gate operations unavoidable global and relative phases occur as by-products due to the internal structure of the governing Hamiltonian. To correct, additional phase rotation gates are used, which increases the computational overhead. Here, we show how these phase by-products can actually be used to our advantage by using them to implement universal quantum computing between qubits not directly coupled to each other. The gate operations, CNOT, Toffoli, and swap gates, require much less computational overhead than present schemes, and are achieved with fidelity greater than 99%. We then present a linear nearest-neighbor architecture that takes full advantage of the phase by-products, and we show how to implement gates from a universal set efficiently in this layout. In this scheme gate operations are realized by only varying a single control parameter per data qubit, and the ability to tune couplings is not required.