CSS grid: place items in "at least column 2"

Question

I have the following HTML:

<div class="grid">
  <div class="special-1"></div>
  <div class="special-1"></div>

  <div class="special-2"></div>
  <div class="special-2"></div>
  <div class="special-2"></div>
  <div class="special-2"></div>
  <div class="special-2"></div>
  <div class="special-2"></div>
</div>

.special-1 is always in the first column. The number of .special-2s is variable, generated by user data. So approximately:

.grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 1fr);
  grid-auto-rows: 1fr;
}

.special-1 {
  grid-column-start: 1;
}

Now the thing is, I want .special-2 to always be in at least the second column. But it can also show in the third or fourth. Is there anyway I can do this? grid-column-start: 2; doesn't work because it will put all of them in column 2 and none in the other columns. So I basically want grid-column: :not(1) or grid-column: 2 | 3 | 4 if you know what I mean. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The answer by Temani Afif surely works, but isn't very scalable. In my usecase there's some different column counts for different viewport sizes. I eventually decided to implement this differently. Note: if by the time you read this CSS Grid Level 2 has been released, this could trivially be solved using css subgrid: caniuse

Now for my solution: I changed my html as such:

<div class="grid">
  <div class="special-1s"
    <div class="special-1"></div>
    <div class="special-1"></div>
  </div>

  <div class="special-2s">
    <div class="special-2"></div>
    <div class="special-2"></div>
    <div class="special-2"></div>
    <div class="special-2"></div>
    <div class="special-2"></div>
    <div class="special-2"></div>
  </div>
</div>

And my css now looks somewhat like below. I forced the rows to a fixed height, which was okay in my use case and made this solution possible.

.grid {
  display: flex;
}

.grid > div {
  display: grid;
  grid-auto-rows: 100px;
}

.special-1s {
  flex: 1;
  grid-template-columns: 1fr;
}

.special-2s {
  --columns: 2;
  flex: var(--columns);
  grid-template-columns: repeat(var(--columns), 1fr);

  @media (min-width: 1000px) {
    --columns: 3;
  }

}

By using the flex-property, I can fake consistent column-sizes across the width of .grid. The --columns property allows me to easily define extra media-queries. (I actually have a few more than shown here.)