The house remained in the Selby family for nearly 300 years. Sir William was succeeded by his nephew, also Sir William, who is notable for handing over the keys of Berwick-upon-Tweed to James I on his way south to succeed to the throne. He married Dorothy Bonham of West Malling but had no children. The Selbys continued until the mid-19th century when the line faltered with Elizabeth Selby, the widow of a Thomas who disinherited his only son. During her reclusive tenure, Joseph Nash drew the house for his multi-volume illustrated history Mansions of England in the Olden Time, published in the 1840s. A brownwash watercolour painting dated c.1828 by Samuel Palmer shows that part of the building had been converted to an oast house.

The house passed to a cousin, Prideaux John Selby, a distinguished naturalist, sportsman and scientist. On his death in 1867 he left the house to his daughter Lewis Marianne Bigge. Her second husband, Robert Luard (with whom she had two children, including the organist Bertram Luard-Selby, who had been born at Ightham Mote), changed his name to Luard-Selby. Ightham Mote was rented in 1887 to the American railway magnate William Jackson Palmer and his family and for three years became a centre for artists and writers of the Aesthetic Movement, with visitors including John Singer Sargent, Henry James and Ellen Terry. When Mrs Bigge died in 1889, the executors of her son Charles Selby-Bigge, a Shropshire land agent, put the house up for sale in July 1889.

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