None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.
Kamo no Chōmei (about 1155 to 1216)
At about fifty, Kamo no Chōmei left court life in Kyoto and took Buddhist vows, and at about sixty he built a hut ten feet square in the hills at Hino, where in 1212 he wrote the Hōjōki, his account of living there. A small, safe place built on purpose and then lived in, by a man whose book records the fire and the earthquake that brought down far larger houses, shows the shape from outside.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Charlotte Lucas (fiction)
In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins and tells Elizabeth that she asks only a comfortable home. At the parsonage the women sit in a room at the back, which keeps her husband in his own book room at the front, and Elizabeth gives her credit for the arrangement. A secure home chosen plainly for what it offers, then arranged so it can be lived in quietly, shows the shape from outside.
Source: gutenberg.org