  A practical implementation of a quantum computer requires robust qubits that
are protected against their noisy environment. Dynamical decoupling techniques
have been successfully used in the past to offer protected high-fidelity gate
operations in negatively-charged Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV-) centers in diamond,
albeit under specific conditions with the intrinsic nitrogen nuclear spin
initialised. In this work, we show how the SMART protocol, an extension of the
dressed-qubit concept, can be implemented for continuous protection to offer
Clifford gate fidelities compatible with fault-tolerant schemes, whilst
prolonging the coherence time of a single NV- qubit at room temperature. We
show an improvement in the average Clifford gate fidelity from $0.940\pm0.005$
for the bare qubit to $0.993\pm0.002$ for the SMART qubit, with the nitrogen
nuclear spin in a random orientation. We further show a $\gtrsim$ 30 times
improvement in the qubit coherence times compared to the bare qubit.
