The history of the family in the Middle East and North Africa is currently going through a state of revival. Since the publication of Duben & Behar’s Istanbul Households (1991) and Meriwether’s The Kin Who Count (1999), among other pioneering case studies, historians and other social scientists have been discovering new archival sources and raising new questions that challenge many prevailing assumptions about the “typical” Muslim or Middle-Eastern family and its transformation from past to present times. Most research has focused on urban contexts within the Ottoman Empire for which data is more available. As a consequence, rural, peripheral societies have been left largely understudied. In this paper, I will examine the case of the Ammeln, a group of Berber-speaking peasants from the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Southern Morocco, where I carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork from 2004 to 2006. I intend to present the distinctive features of their living arrangements by considering a set of family deeds, wills and other legal documents dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries that belonged to a local agnatic group. As these sources show, when local households developed and reached their highest level of complexity, they tended to comprise only a senior couple and no more than one junior couple, who was expected to provide care for the elders and, in exchange, to inherit the house and a greater share of the family estate. As I will argue, the Ammeln adopted this particular level of residential growth, not because they were confronted with demographic constrains and other external barriers preventing them from realizing their “ideal” for larger and more complex households, but because they were attempting, in a strategic and intentional way, to limit the number of couples or family units living together under the same roof, which in turn helped to reduce internal tension and conflict. In the end, the case of the Ammeln sheds light on the problematic nature of intergenerational cohabitation and compels us to reframe key questions to ask when we account for the conditions under which some individuals, in specific places and in specific points in time, choose certain forms of living arrangements rather than others.